"Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints, kill nothing but time." — Unknown
"The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders." — Edward Abbey
"We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." — Albert Einstein
"For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it." — Jacques-Yves Cousteau
"How sad to think that nature speaks and mankind doesn’t listen." — Victor Hugo
"What we see often has more to do with what we have seen in the past or what we hope or expect to see than it does with what is staring us in the face." — Jill Fredston Snowstruck: In the Grip of Avalanches
"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself." — Edward Abbey Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
"A world without open country would be universal jail." — Edward Abbey
"This is the most beautiful place on Earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary." — Edward Abbey Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
"We all have a place, a city park, a mountain trail, a desert flower, a perfect beach break. Some place that brings us outside. Outside our work, outside our lives, outside ourselves. We might share them with others, but they feel like they are just for us. Most often, they are not. These places, as natural and beautiful and untouched as they seem, are larger than us. To exist, these places require effort. So understand the places you love. Learn who works to protect them, and who makes decisions on their behalf. Give your efforts to these places, and truly get outside." — Amy Morrison Stay Wild Magazine, Spring 2015, insert
"Every living thing has the same wish to flourish again and again. Beyond that, our differences are quibbles. I do not want to be a lonely species set adrift from all the rest." — Craig Childs The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild
"We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness." — Edward Abbey
"A vertical cactus garden grows from the wall, as though micro-fissures in the stone have blown clusters of prickly bubbles." — Amanda Tarr Forrest Alpinist Magazine, Issue 65, "Homecoming"
"We believe there are backpacking activities which, if pursued conscientiously, become like Yoga exercises: they give you a clearer understanding and a palpable relationship with your immediate world. We believe that simply walking in the backcountry—taking photographs of nature, painting pictures of it, studying flowers, trees, mosses, and ferns, listening and watching for birds—engenders a special relationship with nature that is unlike any you can find sitting in your living room, or in an office, in a lecture hall, in a church, reading a book, or listening to music. It is a unique relationship. It is an ineluctable relationship. And if you open yourself up to it, let it seep into you, you become a changed person." — The Editor Backpacker Magazine, Issue 1, 1973
"Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond." — Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
"This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls." — John Muir John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
"I have written of inanimate things, rock and water, frost and sun; and it might seem as though this were not a living world. But I have wanted to come to the living things through the forces that create them, for the mountain is one and indivisible, and rock, soil, water and air are no more integral to it than what grows from the soil and breathes the air. All are aspects of one entity, the living mountain. The disintegrating rock, the nurturing rain, the quickening sun, the seed, the root, the bird—all are one." — Nan Shepherd The Living Mountain
"For the duller and fainter we became the clearer was our vision, though only in momentary glimpses. Then, after the sky cleared, we gazed at the stars, blessed immortals of light, shining with marvelous brightness with long lance rays, near-looking and new-looking, as if never seen before." — John Muir Steep Trails
"I had not known that the sunrise was so lavish and that you could actually feel the color when it reached your face." — Craig Childs The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild
"Where the water fell clear of the rock icicles hang, thick as a thigh, many feet in length, and sometimes when the wind blows the falling water askew as it freezes, the icicles are squint. I have seen icicles like a scimitar blade in shape, firm and solid in their place. For once, even the wind has been fixed." — Nan Shepherd The Living Mountain
