Summer always comes and goes too quickly, but that doesn’t mean we stop yearning for our next outdoor adventure. Quotes from our favorite outdoor books or the adventurers we admire most are sometimes just what we need to remember the warmth of a summer sun, the burn of a challenging hike, or the sound of ocean waves crashing just outside of our tent.
Getting out there in the colder months requires a little more motivation. Camping doesn’t have to have an “off-season,” but for most of us, it does have a “pack-many-more-layers-and-prepare-to-be-kinda-cold” season. These outdoor adventure quotes might just inspire you to brave the elements, gather your friends, or go camping solo, even when the days are shorter.
Peruse these words of wisdom and find one that speaks to you. Did we miss an outdoor adventure quote that you love? Leave it in the comments!
Campers Will Love These Adventure Quotes About the Great Outdoors
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” – Rachel Carson
“But the place which you have selected for your camp, though never so rough and grim, begins at once to have its attractions, and becomes a very centre of civilization to you: “Home is home, be it never so homely.” – Henry David Thoreau
[bctt tweet=”“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.’”— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar” username=”thedyrt”]
“It is astonishing how ideas can change an experience. How we can be in a beautiful forest, on a hike through verdant beauty, but if someone told us that the forest was the site of a brutal massacre, the entire hike would be transformed. It would turn ominous and sad. Or if I was told the forest was where Walk Whitman had walked every morning before working on “Leaves of Grass,” the place would take on a holy majesty. Same forest. Same trail and trees. But the idea layered on top of it mutates it, glorifies or damns it.” ― Jedidiah Jenkins, To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
“I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.” – E. B. White
Image from The Dyrt user Leah W.
[bctt tweet=”“A great many people, and more all the time, live their entire lives without ever once sleeping out under the stars.” – Alan S. Kesselheim, Let Them Paddle: Coming of Age on the Water” username=”thedyrt”]
“To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.” — Terry Tempest Williams
“You never conquer a mountain. You stand on the summit a few brief minutes and then the wind blows away your footprints”
― Arlene Blum
[bctt tweet=”“Not just beautiful, though—the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they’re watching me.” — Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore” username=”thedyrt”]
“Now I know the secret of making the best persons; it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the Earth.” — Walt Whitman
“The glories of a mountain campfire are far greater than may be guessed…. One can make a day of any size, and regulate the rising and setting of his own sun and the brightness of its shining.” – John Muir
Image from The Dyrt camper Alan B.
“I feel a hint of pity for those who don’t get to experience the crisp air and excitement of mountain climbing. Are they ever really awake?” ― Tommy Caldwell, The Push: A Climber’s Journey of Endurance, Risk, and Going Beyond Limits
[bctt tweet=”“Light a campfire and everyone’s a storyteller.” – John Geddes” username=”thedyrt”]
“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.” — Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.” — Cheryl Strayed, Wild
“But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called—called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.” — Jack London, The Call of the Wild
[bctt tweet=”“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 off like autumn leaves.” — John Muir, Our National Parks” username=”thedyrt”]
Prepare for your next adventure by downloading maps. The Dyrt PRO lets you download maps and campgrounds without cell service. “My alternative to using pro would be to drive back out to cell service”.
Image from The Dyrt camper Stephanie J.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” — Henry David Thoreau
“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.” — Edward Abbey
“To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.” – Helen Keller
Image from The Dyrt user Chad F.
“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.”– Amelia Earhart
“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my sense put in order.” — John Burroughs
[bctt tweet=”“The outside is the only place we can truly be inside the world.” ― Daniel J. Rice, This Side of Wilderness ” username=”thedyrt”]
““Nature has been for me, for as long as I remember, a source of solace, inspiration, adventure, and delight; a home, a teacher, a companion.” — Lorraine Anderson
Image from The Dyrt camper Daniel J.
“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”― Iris Murdoch
“The farther one gets into the wilderness, the greater is the attraction of its lonely freedom.” — Theodore Roosevelt
[bctt tweet=”“The Earth has music for those who listen.” ― Williams Shakespeare” username=”thedyrt”]
“Forget not that the Earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.” ― Khalil Gibran”
“We still do not know one-thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.” ― Albert Einstein
Image from The Dyrt camper Mikaela R.
[bctt tweet=”“Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So… get on your way.” ― Dr. Seuss” username=”thedyrt”]
“Now I see the secret of making the best person, it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.” ― Walt Whitman
“All forests have their own personality. I don’t just mean the obvious differences, like how an English woodland is different from a Central American rain forest, or comparing tracts of West Coast redwoods to the saguaro forests of the American Southwest… they each have their own gossip, their own sound, their own rustling whispers and smells. A voice speaks up when you enter their acres that can’t be mistaken for one you’d hear anyplace else, a voice true to those particular tress, individual rather than of their species.” ― Charles de Lint, The Onion Girl
“In nature, nothing is perfect and yet everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.” – Alice Walker
