Burning the small dead branches broke from beneath thick spreading whitebark pine. A hundred summers snowmelt rock and air hiss in a twisted bough.

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance beween spirit and humility.

Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.

Wildness It is perennially within us, dormant as a hard-shelled seed, awaiting the fire or flood that awakes it again.

Range after range of mountains. Year after year after year. I am still in love.

Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.

When the mind is exhausted of images, it invents its own.

I hold the most archaic values on earth ... the fertility of the soul, the magic of the animals, the power-vision in solitude.... the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.

The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom.

Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.

You simply have to put one foot in front of the other and keep going. Put blinders on and plow right ahead.

There is an old and very wise Native American saying: Every time you point a finger in scorn—there are three remaining fingers pointing right back at you.

I've always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.

I've written a bunch of stuff that no one's ever heard, and I don't know if they ever will. I'm just doing it for my own edification.

I initially studied literature [in France], and then I went to cinema school. I discovered the Cinematheque, and saw not only action movies and westerns, but also lots of serious movies.

Converse, converse, CONVERSE, with living men, face to face, mind to mind-that is one of the best sources of knowledge.

After a child has arrived at the legal age for attending school,-whether he be the child of noble or of peasant,-the only two absolute grounds of exemption from attendance are sickness and death.

There is one thing we can do, and the happiest of people are those who do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present.

The only reason to write is from love.

Time doesn't heal scars as most people commonly think. It simply makes them firmer, stiffer. One must accept it and not hope to mend and return to what he or she once was.