Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.

My dog does not care where heat comes from, but he cares that it comes, and soon. Indeed he considers my ability to make it come as something magical, for when I rise in the coal black pre-dawn and kneel by the hearth to make a fire, he pushes himself blandly between me and the kindling splits I have laid in the ashes, and I must touch a match to them by poking it between his legs. Such faith , I suppose, is the kind that moves mountains.

Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.

Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind; I have no hope for conservation born of fear.

The worthiness of any cause is not measured by its clean record, but by its readiness to see the blots when they are pointed out, and to change its mind.

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.