Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Mother Nature is always speaking. She speaks in a language understood within the peaceful mind of the sincere observer. Leopards, cobras, monkeys, rivers and trees; they all served as my teachers when I lived as a wanderer in the Himalayan foothills.

I want my children to live in the country, to be a part of nature.

Living in a rural setting exposes you to so many marvelous things - the natural world and the particular texture of small-town life, and the exhilarating experience of open space.

My life is the land, the dogs, the car, the motorcycle, the pond, the canoe, going to pick up mail. It's just a rural retreat that I enjoy.

I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.

We should be rolling in the dirt, gardening, wrestling with some brambles and skinning animals for supper. These are important immune system builders.

I spent a lot of my life - 20 years of it - in war, training army trackers and commanding a tracker unit, and then in the Game Department, tracking lions and elephants and poachers. So I've spent literally thousands of hours tracking people or animals, and training others to do it.

I was just different. When the other kids gravitated to football or basketball, I went fishing and skating. I was into trapping animals, pheasants and squirrels. Not only was I trapper, I was a taxidermist.

It's the little details I love. How to fletch your arrows with owl feathers, because owls fly silently, so maybe your arrows will, too. How to carry fire in a piece of smouldering fungus wrapped in birchbark. These are the things which help a world come alive.

As a kid in Africa, you were so connected to nature itself because you went farming, watched the moon out at night, observed how the sky was different, and how the birds chanted different songs in the evening and the morning.

I had one of the most outdoorsy childhoods you could imagine. I basically lived in the woods until I was 13. My dad and I built a huge treehouse in our backyard in Chesterfield, about 30 feet in the air. And we'd vacation on an island in Michigan, where I hunted a deer that we ate.

Alaska is what happens when Willy Wonka and the witch from Hansel and Gretel elope, buy a place together upstate, renounce their sweet teeth, and turn into health fanatics.

I miss hunting and when I go home I always find an opportunity to go for a hunt again, out in the bush veldt.

Normally when I have students over, we sit in the house and look at the fields to try to catch a glimpse of a bobcat hunting.

When I was growing up, and other people I knew were getting into trouble, I was somewhere in a deer stand or going to bed early so I could be up before dawn to hunt turkeys. My love of the outdoors kept me solid.

I have grown up on a diet of sunrise picnics, learning the names of butterflies, planting trees.

I love the outdoors. I love getting to hunt and fish and work on the land and ride our horses.

As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prarie-dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor's to gossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits.

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.

The policy of man consists, at first, in endeavoring to arrive at a state equal to that of animals, whom nature has furnished with food, clothing, and shelter.

Man is a fugitive from nature.

This is the Wilderness School. 'Where the Kids are animals

Animals teach us about the animals in ourselves. We need their spirits.

If I had the chance to spend a day with Werner Herzog, I would want there to be a canoe involved. I want to be down in Patagonia or something, and kill some kind of wild beast and skin it and gut it and cook it. And then turn its fur into some kind of layer of warmth. And then trek through the hills.

What would our lives be like if our days and nights were as immersed in nature as they are in technology?