Wilderness Quotes

Not to have known -- as most men have not -- either the mountain or the desert is not to have known oneís self.

Joseph Wood Krutch

Nothing is less known; nothing more neglected. The forest is a gift of nature which it is sufficient to except just as it calms from her hands.

Georges-Louis Leclerc

The key to intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts.

Aldo Leopold

The time is almost upon us when a pack-train must wind its way up a graveled highway and turn its bellmare in the pasture of a summer hotel. When that day comes, the pack-train will be dead, the diamond hitch will be merely rope, and Kit Carson and Jim Bridger will be names in a history lesson. And thenceforth the march of empire will be a matter of gasoline and four wheel brakes.

Aldo Leopold

Man always kills the things he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

Aldo Leopold

Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Food chains are the living channels which conduct energy upward; death and decay return it to the soil. The circuit is not closed; some energy is dissipated in decay, some is added by absorption from the air, some is stored in soils, peats, and long-lived forests; but it is a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life.

Aldo Leopold

Gueorgui love to the forest, the forest as old as a legend, gentle as a mother and stern as a father.

Nicolai Levkov

The land, the earth God gave to man for his home...should never be the possession of any man, corporation, (or) society...any more than the air or water.

Abraham Lincoln

All things are symbols: the external shows of Nature have their image in the mindÖ

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I have learned a lot from trees; Sometimes about the weather, Sometimes about animals, Sometimes about the Great Spirits.

Tatanga Mani

The machine called Nature into an art form. For the first time at men began to regard Nature as a source of aesthetic and spiritual values.

Marshal McLuhan

The universe has been quite literally writing upon humans for many thousands of years, and our alphabets are among the traits that nature has carved in order to cross our minds. Wild lands have caught deeper trails in my life than I will ever be able to make in the forest.

Joe Meeker†

The size of the parcel of land matters less than the relationship of the people to it.

Frances Moores Lappe

Keep close to Nature's heart, yourself; and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

John Muir†

The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best He ever planted.

John Muir