These national life quotes will inspire you. National life, involving, or relating to a nation as a whole or of, relating to, or characteristic of a particular nation.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging national life quotes, national life sayings, and national life proverbs.
Best National Life Quotes
- “National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” ~ Wallace Stegner
- “The establishment of the National Park Service is justified by considerations of good administration, of the value of natural beauty as a National asset, and of the effectiveness of outdoor life and recreation in the production of good citizenship.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” ~ John Muir
-
“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “Within National Parks is room–glorious room–room in which to find ourselves, in which to think and hope, to dream and plan, to rest and resolve.” ~ Enos Mills
- “There is nothing so American as our national parks. The scenery and the wildlife are native. The fundamental idea behind the parks is native. It is, in brief, that the country belongs to the people, that it is in process of making for the enrichment of the lives of all of us. The parks stand as the outward symbal of the great human principle.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
- “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.” ~ John Muir
-
“The national park is the best idea America ever had.” ~ James Bryce
- “National parks and reserves are an integral aspect of intelligent use of natural resources. It is the course of wisdom to set aside an ample portion of our natural resources as national parks and reserves, thus ensuring that future generations may know the majesty of the earth as we know it today.” ~ John F. Kennedy
- “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.” ~ John Muir
- “Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong.” ~ George Carlin
-
“The mountains are calling and I must go.” ~ John Muir
- “The national park idea has been nurtured by each succeeding generation of Americans. Today, across our land, the National Park System represents America at its best. Each park contributes to a deeper understanding of the history of the United States and our way of life; of the natural processes which have given form to our land, and to the enrichment of the environment in which we live.” ~ George B. Hartzog, Jr.
- “The national parks belong to everyone. To the people. To all of us. The government keeps saying so and maybe, in this one case at least, the government is telling the truth. Hard to believe, but possible.” ~ Edward Abbey
- “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.” ~ John Muir
-
“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” ~ John Muir
- “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.” ~ John Muir
- “Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” ~ John Muir
- “We are facing an enormous crisis in Africa right now in terms of illegal wildlife trafficking, which is decimating animal populations, destroying local economies, and funding armed insurgencies and terrorist syndicates. If we do not find solutions to this crisis now, there will be little habitat left beyond sparse areas of national parks that will serve as glorified zoos to small pockets of remaining animals.” ~ David Jeremiah Barron
-
“Wilderness, like the national park system, was an American idea.” ~ Stewart Udall
- “If the national park is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America has ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.” ~ Wallace Stegner
- “The National Park Service today exemplifies one of the highest traditions of public service.” ~ Stewart Udall
- “Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer.” ~ John Muir
-
“…Skyscraper National Park” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- “The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.” ~ Robert Smithson
- “The same people in the Congress who are busy kicking holes in the social safety net are also those who would sell off the nation’s forests for a song, give away its national parks, and trash its wilderness preserves; there is a connection between the two impulses.” ~ Paul Gruchow
- “How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!” ~ John Muir
-
“That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.” ~ Wallace Stegner
- “The fundamental idea…is that the country belongs to the people, that it is in process of making for the enrichment of the lives of all of us.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
- “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.” ~ John Muir
- “Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature’s darlings.” ~ John Muir
- “When I was about fifteen, I went to work at Yosemite National Park. It changed me forever. Nature had carved its own sculpture, and I was part of it, not the other way around.” ~ Robert Redford
-
“I grew up on the edge of a national park in Canada – timberwolves, creeks, snow drifts.” ~ Dan Aykroyd
- “Family trips to Yellowstone and to what are now national parks in Southern Utah, driving the primitive roads and cars of that day, were real adventures.” ~ Paul D. Boyer
- “Television was supposed to be a national park. (Instead) it has become a money machine… It’s a commodity now, just like pork bellies.” ~ Fred W. Friendly
- “I believe the National Park Service has demonstrated strong partnerships geared towards respecting the private property of citizens in its administering of the current Trail of Tears National Historic Trail and will continue to do so upon the addition of the routes.” ~ Zach Wamp
-
“Glaciers are almost gone from Glacier National Park” ~ Donella Meadows
- “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little window-sill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National parks — the Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc. — Nature’s sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world.” ~ John Muir
- “Teachers can go on cruises with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and anyone can spend the summer as a volunteer in a National Parks and even earn money doing it.” ~ Matthew Lesko
- “So when people go to the park this summer, they are not going to have the same quality of a visit. There is not going to be a ranger out on the trail to tell them about the important cultural and historic areas within the Olympic National Park.” ~ Norm Dicks
-
“Going to the mountains is going home.” ~ John Muir
- “Antarctica is one of the most remote and beautiful places on earth. I don’t think that everyone should go there. I also think that we need to respect it as a kind of a national park for the planet. It should be you know put in parentheses.” ~ DJ Spooky
- “I think every child in every country, not just South Africa, every year should go to a national park, and it should be part of their basic curriculum.” ~ Lewis Pugh
- “For it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and our civilization. Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland.” ~ John Steinbeck
-
“While cares will drop off like autumn leaves.” ~ John Muir
- “Without the support of local people, you might as well give up because you can make all the noise you like, you can demarcate a national park, but if the people outside want to go creeping into a forest you really can’t stop them. They’ve got to get a benefit.” ~ Jane Goodall
- “The central part of the state is more remote and less scenic, and there’s a huge agricultural belt that stretches from the south of Lake Okeechobee to the border of Everglades National Park, where the restoration effort is being concentrated, .. Obviously the movement to save the Everglades runs up against agricultural concerns.” ~ Carl Hiaasen
- “If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you’ll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors. When you walk into it, then you see it in a completely different way. You discover it in a much slower, more majestic sort of way.” ~ Bill Bryson
-
“The National Park Service shot a mule in the face. He survived but had trouble swallowing and often food came out of his nose.” ~ Cleveland Amory
- “It is our duty to preserve huge tracts of land in something resembling its native condition. The biological interactions necessary to insure the continuities of life are astonishingly complex, and cannot take place in islands of semiwilderness like the national parks.” ~ William Kittredge
- “There was a very important superintendent of Yellowstone, a man who was involved in the founding of the National Park Service itself, Horace Albright. And he became superintendent, which is the boss of Yellowstone Park, in 1919 – from 1919 to 1929. Later, he was director of the park service itself. Albright embraced the idea that in order for the national parks – and Yellowstone in particular – to have support from the American people and from politicians, there needed to be wildlife as spectacle.” ~ David Quammen
- “Folk music isn’t owned by anybody. It is owned by everybody, like the national parks, the postal system, and the school system. It’s our common property. There is nobody’s name on it. Nobody can make money on it. It’s not copywritten.” ~ Utah Phillips
-
“National parks, zoos, protected areas, polluted seas – using the whole world as a readymade, I thought about it as a stage set. To activate a stage set you need a drama, an actor to offset it.” ~ Aleksandra Mir
- “This is an especially good time for you vacationers who plan to fly, because the Reagan administration, as part of the same policy under which it recently sold Yellowstone National Park to Wayne Newton, has “deregulated” the airline industry. What this means for you, the consumer, is that the airlines are no longer required to follow any rules whatsoever. They can show snuff movies. They can charge for oxygen. They can hire pilots right out of Vending Machine Refill Person School.” ~ Dave Barry
- “There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people’s imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.” ~ Robert Hass
- “Nature is located mainly in national parks, which are vast tracts of wilderness that have been set aside by the United States government so citizens will always have someplace to go where they can be attacked by bears. And we’re not talking about ordinary civilian bears, either: We’re talking about federal bears, which can behave however they want to because they are protected by the same union as postal clerks.” ~ Dave Barry
-
“The prediction that glaciers will be gone from Glacier National Park has been moved up by 10 years to 2020, the same year it’s predicted the Arctic Sea will be ice-free in the summer.” ~ Bill Kurtis
- “I think, too, that we’ve got to recognize that where the preservation of a natural resource like the redwoods is concerned, that there is a common sense limit. I mean, if you’ve looked at a hundred thousand acres or so of trees-you know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?
Opposing expansion of Redwood National Park.” ~ Ronald Reagan - “Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs-anything-but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places.” ~ Edward Abbey
- “I’ve been through legislation creating a dozen national parks, and there’s always the same pattern. When you first propose a park, and you visit the area and present the case to the local people, they threaten to hang you. You go back in five years and they think it’s the greatest thing that ever happened.” ~ Mo Udall
- “Many have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract homes and billboards, why picture that? The question sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue – why open our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national parks?” ~ Robert Adams
-
“I do have spare time and I love to read, and I love just to go to a national park and just relax and just think. But most of the time, it’s swimming or talking.” ~ Lewis Pugh
- “In terms of economical aspects, reinforcing those national parks with sophisticated anti-poaching patrols – these poachers are beefed up like the army. In the case of Cameroon, that’s a perfect example of the lack of finance. The government could not provide the national park with more guards. Therefore, they lost the majority of the elephant population. I don’t want to see that anywhere else.” ~ Veronika Varekova
- “We are all going to die. When it happens in such a drastic, inhuman way, which we’ve been seeing in Africa, this is crime on its highest level. It is affecting not only the security of the national parks, it is affecting the people in communities that live around the national parks. In terms of security for wildlife and our society, it’s an incredibly alarming situation, and we need to address that.” ~ Veronika Varekova
- “I haven’t been to Tasmania. I haven’t been to the South Pole, and I haven’t been to the North Pole. I want to see the polar bear migration before there are no polar bears. I want to see Glacier National Park before the glacier melts.” ~ Martha Stewart
