That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.
Wallace StegnerRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the importance of preserving wilderness as a fundamental aspect of America's greatest idea, which is the concept of national parks.
Wallace Stegner reflects on the significance of national parks in America, suggesting that they represent a pinnacle of human achievement in understanding the value of nature. When he states that wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of this idea, he asserts that protecting natural landscapes is vital not only for their beauty but also for the fundamental values they represent in American culture.
Themes
WildernessPreservationNatureNational ParksAmerica
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be shared at a conservation rally to emphasize the importance of protecting national parks.
More from Wallace Stegner
All quotes βTouch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.
Wallace StegnerRead
Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
Wallace StegnerRead
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
Wallace StegnerRead
I was shaped by the west and have lived most of my life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than to see it in all its subregions and subcultures both prosperous and environmentally healthy, with a civilization to match its scenery.
Wallace StegnerRead
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Wallace StegnerRead
Similar quotes
Hold out your hands to feel the luxury of the sunbeams.
Helen KellerRead
A sensitive plant in a garden grew,_x000D_ _x000D_ And the young winds fed it with silver dew,_x000D_ _x000D_ And it opened its fan_x000D_ _x000D_ like leaves to the light,_x000D_ _x000D_ and closed them beneath the kisses of night.
Percy Bysshe ShelleyRead
Why use up the forests which were centuries in the making and the mines which required ages to lay down, if we can get the equivalent of forest and mineral products in the annual growth of the hemp fields?
Henry FordRead
Jordan has a strange, haunting beauty and a sense of timelessness. Dotted with the ruins of empires once great, it is the last resort of yesterday in the world of tomorrow. I love every inch of it.
King Hussein IRead
I see a world in the future in which we understand that all life is related to us and we treat that life with great humility and respect.
David SuzukiRead
If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur, then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.
Thomas BerryRead