Quote collection
322 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I am very blessed. The Valley is full of people, but they do not annoy me. I revolve in pathless places and in higher rocks than the world and his ribbony wife can reach."
"So abundant and novel are the objects of interest in a pure wilderness that unless you are pursuing special studies it matters little where you go, or how often to the same place. Wherever you chance to be always seems at the moment of all places the best; and you feel that there can be no happiness in this world or in any other for those who may not be happy there."
"Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or little we may be able to read them; telling their wanderings even by their scents alone."
"No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself."
"If I should be fated to walk no more with Nature, be compelled to leave all I most devoutly love in the wilderness, return to civilization and be twisted into the characterless cable of society, then these sweet, free, cumberless rovings will be as chinks and slits on life's horizon, through which I may obtain glimpses of the treasures that lie in God's wilds beyond my reach."
"Divine love is the sublime boss of the universe."
"When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe ... The whole wilderness is unity and interrelation, is alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly."
"Man is always and everywhere a blight on the landscape."
"I was awakened by a tremendous earthquake, and though I hadn ever before enjoyed a storm of this sort, the strange thrilling motion could not be mistaken, and I ran out of my cabin, both glad and frightened, shouting, "A noble earthquake! A noble earthquake" feeling sure I was going to learn something."
"How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! To behold this alone is worth the pains of any excursion a thousand times over. The highest peaks burned like islands in a sea of liquid shade. Then the lower peaks and spires caught the glow, and long lances of light, streaming through many a notch and pass, fell thick on the frozen meadows."
"The power of imagination is infinite."
"Nature had gathered her choicest treasures , to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her"
"The battle we have fought, and are still fighting, for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong."
"Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God's mountains."
"Writing is like the life of a glacier; one eternal grind."
"Who reports the works and ways of the clouds, those wondrous creations coming into being every day like freshly upheaved mountains?"
"To the lover of pure wildness Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world."
"Large flocks of butterflies, all kinds of happy insects, seem to be in a perfect fever of joy and sportive gladness."
"One may as well dam for water tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man."
"In nothing does man, with his grand notions of heaven and charity, show forth his innate, low-bred, wild animalism more clearly than in his treatment of his brother beasts. From the shepherd with his lambs to the red-handed hunter, it is the same; no recognition of rights - only murder in one form or another."