How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook!
O, God assist our side: at least, avoid assisting the enemy and leave the rest to me.
Hemispheric solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky.
It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.
Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands.
It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.
Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains; a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness.
It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.
For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is; keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.
Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them.
He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested.
To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants – a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense.
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.
Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.
The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.
Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.