“I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.”

“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”

“Man always kills the thing 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. ...”

“No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.”

“To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”

“Wildness is the preservation of the World.”

“Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.”

“A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.”

“That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.”

“One of the anomalies of modern ecology is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community, almost as if it were a sep...”

“I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.”

“Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wantingSo much as just finding the gold.It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,It's the forests where silence has lease;It's the beauty that thrills me with w...”

“All forests are one... They are all echoes of the first forest that gave birth to Mystery when the world began.”