Edward Abbey Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old Edward Abbey quotes, Edward Abbey sayings, and Edward Abbey proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.'

I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it. Edward Abbey
Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful. Edward Abbey
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. Edward Abbey
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. Edward Abbey
New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York? Edward Abbey
You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light. Edward Abbey
The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny. Edward Abbey
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. Edward Abbey
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
The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws. Edward Abbey
I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them. Edward Abbey
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
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. Edward Abbey
A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be – will be — a human zoo. A high-tech slum. Edward Abbey
Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second. Edward Abbey
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. Edward Abbey
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
There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California. Edward Abbey
I choose to listen to the river for a while, thinking river thoughts, before joining the night and the stars. Edward Abbey
If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness. Edward Abbey
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit. Edward Abbey
The reason we need wilderness is because we are really wild animals. Every man needs a place he can go, to go crazy in peace. Only then can we return to man's other life, to the other way, to the order and sanity and beauty of what will somewhere be, unless all visions are false, the human community. Edward Abbey
The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders. Edward Abbey
Love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach. It is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need if only we had the eyes to see. Edward Abbey
Wilderness complements and completes civilization. I might say that the existence of wilderness is also a compliment to civilization. Any society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name of civilization. Edward Abbey
Wilderness begins in the human mind. Edward Abbey
You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light. Edward Abbey
The very poor are strictly materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic. Edward Abbey
What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote. Edward Abbey
In all of nature, there is no sound more pleasing than that of a hungry animal at its feed. Unless you are the food. Edward Abbey