Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.

It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.

If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow. Invasions can be arrested or modified in a manner to keep an area usable either for recreation, science or for wildlife, but the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible. It follows, then, that any wilderness program is a rearguard action, through which retreats are reduced to a minimum.

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.

I confess my own leisure to be spent entirely in search of adventure, without regard to prudence, profit, self improvement, learning, or any other serious thing.

It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it