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.

How vivid is the suffering of the few when the people are few and how the suffering of nameless millions in two world wars is blurred over by numbers.

Nature is shy and noncommittal in a crowd. To learn her secrets, visit her alone or with a single friend, at most. Everything evades you, everything hides, even your thoughts escape you, when you walk in a crowd.

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.

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

You can prove almost anything with the evidence of a small enough segment of time. How often, in any search for truth, the answer of the minute is positive, the answer of the hour qualified, the answers of the year contradictory!

The measure of an enthusiasm must be taken between interesting events. It is between bites that the lukewarm angler loses heart.

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.

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

As the pressure of population increasingly regiments us and crowds us closer together, an association with the wild, winged freedom of the birds will fill an ever growing need in our lives.

Our minds, as well as our bodies, have need of the out-of-doors. Our spirits, too, need simple things, elemental things, the sun and the wind and the rain, moonlight and starlight, sunrise and mist and mossy forest trails, the perfumes of dawn and the smell of fresh-turned earth and the ancient music of wind among the trees.

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.

It is morally as bad not to care whether anything is true or not.

All things seem possible in May.

Any fine morning, a power saw can fell a tree that took a thousand years to grow.