17 Quotes by Frédéric Gros

When you hurry, time is filled to bursting, like a badly-arranged drawer in which you have stuffed different things without any attempt at order.

Discipline is the impossible conquered by the obstinate repetition of the possible.

Thus the man who walks all day has become certain by nightfall.

Happiness is fragile precisely because it is not repeatable; opportunities for it are rare and random, like gold threads in the world’s fabric. They ought to be seized.

Being in company forces one to jostle, hamper, walk at the wrong speed for others. When walking it’s essential to find your own basic rhythm, and maintain it. The right basic rhythm is the one that suits you, so well that you don’t tire and can keep it up for ten hours. But it is highly specific and exact. So that when you are forced to adjust to someone else’s pace, to walk faster or slower than usual, the body follows badly.

Just as there are several solitudes, so there are several silences.

He wasn’t walking to find his own identity, or to rediscover a disguised singularity, or to get a rest from shuffling masks; but walking long distances to find in himself the man from another age, the first man. Walking, but not as one might go to the desert to escape the world and its horrors, purified by solitude, prepared for one’s celestial destiny. But walking to find in himself the man fresh from the hands of Nature, the absolute primitive.

When there is really nothing left to do or believe, except to remember, walking helps retrieve the absolute simplicity of presence, beyond all hope, before any expectation.