To underestimate one's thirst, to pass a given landmark to the right or left, to find a dry spring where one looked for running water - there is no help for any of these things.

For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars.

Life set itself to new processions of seed-time and harvest, the skin newly turned to seasonal variations, the very blood humming to new altitudes.

I do not know who sings my songs / Before they are sung by me.

Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise. ... The cunningest hunger is hunted in turn, and what he leaves of his kill is meat for some other. That is the economy of nature, but with it all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man. There is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor.

Genius may be for an hour or a thousand years; its indispensable quality is continuity with the life-push.

I suppose no man becomes a pocket hunter by first intention.