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We abuse the land because we regard it as a community belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.

I'll have a fire going in just a few minutes.

Don't eat the yellow snow!

Each time you leave the cosseted and hygienic world of towns and take yourself into the hills you go through a series of staged transformations - a kind of gentle descent into squalor - and each time it is as if you have never done it before. At the end of the first day, you feel mildly, self-consciously, grubby; by the second day, disgustingly so; by the third you are beyond caring; by the fourth you have forgotten what it is like not to be like this. Hunger, too, follows a defined pattern. On the first night your are starving for your noodles; on the second night you are starving but wish it wasn't noodles; on the third night you don't want the noodles but know you had better eat something; by the fourth you have no appetite at all but just eat because that is what you do at this time of day. I can't explain it, but it's strangely agreeable.

Bear? run down hill, Mountain Lion? jump aroun like a crazy person, And A Pissed Off Forest Ranger? Well you've better have a full flask or a pretty girl friend with ya!

For me, and for thousands with similar inclinations, the most important passion of life is the overpowering desire to escape periodically from the clutches of a mechanistic civilization. To us the enjoyment of solitude, complete independence, and the beauty of undefiled panoramas is absolutely essential to happiness.

Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints

If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you—beyond the next turning of the canyon walls.

I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

None of Nature's landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.

In all excursions, when danger is realized, thought is quickened, common care buried, and pictures of wild immortal beauty are pressed into the memory, to dwell forever

But in every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks.

Not all those who wander are lost!

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

We climb not to conquer the mountain but ourselves.

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

Of the gladdest moments n human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood.

Now I see the secret of making the best person, it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.