National Parks Quotes and Sayings
These national park quotes convey some of the beauty associated with these one-of-a-kind areas.
National parks protect our nation’s most beautiful and remarkable landscapes. Millions of people visit national parks each year.
Hopefully, these quotes and sayings will inspire you to explore the national parks and the great outdoors.
Inspirational National Parks 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
Well, once you’ve been in the Canyon and once you’ve sort of fallen in love with it, it never ends… it’s always been a fascinating place to me; in fact, I’ve often said that if I ever had a mistress, it would be the Grand Canyon.
Barry Goldwater
In wilderness is the preservation of the world.
Henry David Thoreau
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
That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.
Wallace Stegner (Editor’s Pick: Favorite national parks quotes)
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
There will never be a photograph of the Grand Canyon that can adequately describe its depth, breadth, and true beauty.
Stefanie Payne
Yosemite Quotes
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 knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite.
Ansel Adams
Yosemite Park… None can escape its charms. Its natural beauty cleans and warms like a fire, and you will be willing to stay forever in one place like a tree.
John Muir
Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.
Ansel Adams
The parks do not belong to one state or to one section. Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon are national properties in which every citizen has a vested interest; they belong as much to the man of Massachusetts, of Michigan, of Florida as they do to the people of California, of Wyoming, and of Arizona.
Stephen Mather
Grand Canyon Quotes
I believe in science and evolution. I’ve been to the Grand Canyon.
Bill Walton
If you’re ever thinking, “Oh, but I’m a waste of space, I’m a burden, remember, that also describes the Grand Canyon.
Marty Rubin
Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.
George Will
Yellowstone Quotes
In Yellowstone National Park, there are mod “Do Not Feed the Animals” signs than there are animals you might wish to feed.
Natalie Jeremijenko
The Yellowstone River is a beautiful river to navigate.
William Henry Ashley
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
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
Good Quotations About National Parks
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
I grew up on the edge of a national park in Canada – timberwolves, creeks, snow drifts.
Dan Aykroyd
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
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
Gustave Flaubert
The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.
Robert Smithson
The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself.
John Wesley Powell
Beautiful doesn’t begin to describe it. A flower is beautiful. But this is beautiful the way that a person is beautiful- terrifying with its jagged edges, yet seductive with its crevices that hide so many secrets.
Jeri Smith-Ready
National Park Sayings
The national park is the best idea America ever had.
James Bryce
I don’t believe that anyone can see the Grand Canyon area for themselves and not know that we have to do everything we can to protect it for future generations.
Nolan Gould
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
I believe in evolution. But I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there also.
John McCain
At the foot of the mountain, the park ended, and suddenly all was squalor again. I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America — a belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding. America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn’t have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.
Bill Bryson
Mother Nature is a master sculptor and in no place is that more evident than at Arches National Park.
Stefanie Payne
The glories and the beauties of form, color, and sound unite in the Grand Canyon
John Wesley Powell
I crave time in Yosemite like I crave food and water.
Tommy Caldwell
John Muir Quotes
John Muir was known as the Father of the National Parks. He is one of America’s most famous naturalists and conservationists. He has inspired us to protect our country’s wild places like Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks.
How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!
John Muir
It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way, explain Yosemite’s grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized, they are mostly hidden.
John Muir
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
John Muir
The snow is melting into music.
John Muir
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
No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life as if into this one mountain mansion Nature had gathered her choicest treasures.
John Muir
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
John Muir
Inspirational
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
Keep close to Nature’s heart and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.
John Muir
In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.
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
Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer.
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
Going to the mountains is going home.
John Muir
Presidential Quotes about our National Parks
There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm. The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation, increased and not impaired in value.
Theodore Roosevelt
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 symbol of the great human principle.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Our National Parks belong to each of us, and they are natural places to learn, exercise, volunteer, spend time with family and friends and enjoy the magnificent beauty of our great land.
George W. Bush
Preservation – National Parks Quotes
The idea of preserving in a national grouping such spots of scenic beauty and historic memory originated here in this country. In Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, other countries have followed our pioneering example and set aside their most magnificent scenic areas as national treasures for the enjoyment of present and future generations.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
National parks and reserves are an integral aspect of the 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
If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Top Ten Most Visited National Parks
- Great Smoky Mountains National Park
- Yellowstone National Park
- Zion National Park
- Rocky Mountain National Park
- Grand Teton National Park
- Grand Canyon National Park
- Cuyahoga Valley National Park
- Acadia National Park
- Olympic National Park
- Joshua Tree National Park
National Parks FAQs
Here are some frequently asked questions about national parks in the U.S.
There are 432 national park sites in the United States. There are national parks in each state.
Per Travel US News, the best U.S. national parks are as follows:
1.) Yellowstone,
2.) Yosemite,
3.) Glacier National Park,
4.) Grand Canyon, and
5.) Zion National Park.
Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve is the largest with 13.2 million acres. It is bigger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon combined.
By M.J. O’Halloran
M.J. is a writer and photographer who calls St. Paul, Minnesota home.
Etcetera
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