If the national park is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America has ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.

That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.

Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time.

If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.

History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.

Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.