We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.

Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.

What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works. What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one's own land?

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.

The sweetest hunts are stolen. To steal a hunt, either go far into the wilderness where no one has been, or else find some undiscovered place under everybody's nose

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.

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.