To those whom the tree, the birds, the wildflowers represent only locked-up dollars have never known or really seen these things.

Whenever there is an organized movement to persuade people to believe or do something, whenever an effort is made to propagate a creed or set of opinions or convictions or to make people act as we want them to act, the means employed are called propaganda.

If man can take care of man, nature can take care of the rest.

Even the lifelong traveler knows but an infinitesimal portion of the Earth's surface. Those who have written best about the land and its wild inhabitants...have often been stay-at-home naturalists...concentrating their attention and affection on a relatively small area.

The city man, in his neon-and-mazda glare, knows nothing of nature's midnight. His electric lamps surround him with synthetic sunshine. They push back the dark. They defend him from the realities of the age-old night.

It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.

How strangely inaccurate it is to measure length of living by length of life! The space between your birth and death is often far from a true measure of your days of living.

How sad would be November if we had no knowledge of the spring!

Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, time seems speeded up. What was is not and never again will be; what is is change.

The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web.

To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same -- follow a river. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature's own Wilderness Road.

Noise is evolving not only the endurers of noise but the needers of noise.

In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.

It is easier to accept the message of the stars than the message of the salt desert. The stars speak of man's insignificance in the long eternity of time; the desert speaks of his insignificance right now.

For the mind disturbed, the still beauty of dawn is nature's finest balm.

How many beautiful trees gave their lives that today's scandal should, without delay, reach a million readers.

Looking at life through the eyes of a Daddy long legs: Imagine walking on legs so long you could cover a mile in fifty strides! Imagine looking to either side through eyes set not in your head but in a... hump in your back! Imagine your knees, when you walked, working a dozen feet or more above your head.

It is not races but individuals that are noble and courageous or ignoble and craven or considerate or persistent or philosophical or reasonable. The race gets credit when the percentage of noble individuals is high.

I see, when I bend close, how each leaflet of a climbing rose is bordered with frost, the autumn counterpart of the dewdrops of summer dawns. The feathery leaves of yarrow are thick with silver rime and dry thistle heads rise like goblets plated with silver catching the sun.

Better a thousand times even a swiftly fading, ephemeral moment of life than the epoch-long unconsciousness of the stone.