It is a great art to saunter.

Thoreau’s remark comes from his late essay “Walking,” developed from lectures he delivered in the 1850s and published posthumously in 1862. In it, he defends the daily walk not as mere exercise or leisure but as a disciplined practice of attention and freedom—an antidote to the hurried, utilitarian spirit of modern life. Thoreau plays on the older sense of “saunter” (which he discusses at length) to suggest a kind of purposeful wandering, aligned with nature and the “wild,” rather than a casual stroll. The line appears as he begins to elevate walking into a serious art with moral and spiritual stakes.

The sentence compresses a central Thoreauvian paradox: what looks idle is actually a demanding craft. “Sauntering” implies moving without obvious destination, yet Thoreau treats it as an art requiring independence from schedules, commerce, and social expectation. To saunter well is to cultivate receptivity—letting landscape, weather, and thought guide one’s pace—and to recover a wilder, less instrumental relation to the world. The phrase also critiques a culture that values only productivity: the highest human activities may appear unproductive, but they train perception and restore the self. In this sense, sauntering becomes a practice of freedom and a method of knowing.