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

Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.

This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it - a vast pulsing harmony - its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.

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

A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans.

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.

We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.