I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.
Wander a whole summer if you can. Time will not be taken from the sum of life. Instead of shortening, it will definitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal.
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer.
To the lover of wilderness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.
Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.
In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world.
Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods.
As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing.
Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.
No right way is easy in this rough world. We must risk our lives to save them.
Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!
The battle for conservation will go on endlessly. It is part of the universal battle between right and wrong.
I might have become a millionaire, but I chose to become a tramp.
A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.
There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation’s braggart lords.
How many hearts with warm, red blood in them are beating under cover of the woods, and how many teeth and eyes are shining? A multitude of animal people, intimately related to us, but of whose lives we know almost nothing, are as busy about their own affairs as we are about ours.
So extraordinary is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert. And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees...
None of Nature’s landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.
Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.