67 Inspiring Outdoor Play Quotes for Those Who Love Nature
A collection of over 60 inspiring outdoor play quotes for parents, educators, and nature lovers
Outdoor Play + Learning Quotes
“If we want our children to move mountains, we first have to let them get out of their chairs.” -Nicolette Sowder
“Before we ever put a pencil in a child’s hands, those hands should dig, climb, press, pull, squish, twist, and pinch in a wide array of environments and with a variety of materials.”
Amanda morgan
“Nature play is not another thing to shove into the crevices of an already overloaded schedule. A childhood built upon nature play is a different way to do childhood altogether.” -Ginny Yurich
“Young people, I want to beg of you always keep your eyes open to what Mother Nature has to teach you. By so doing you will learn many valuable things every day of your life.” – George Washington Carver
“All children need nature. Not just the ones whose parents appreciate nature. Not only those children of a certain economic class or culture or set of abilities. Every child.” -Richard Louv
“Children cannot bounce off the walls if we take away the walls.” -Erin Kenny
“When a child gives you a gift, even if it’s a rock they just picked up, exude gratitude. It may be the only the only thing they have to give, and they have chosen to give it to you.” -Dean Jackson
“Their minds were not built to sit and be taught. They were built to explore, play, and learn.” -Layla Gordon Lu
“Children deserve to grow and learn in a place and alongside a force that is as wild and alive as they are.” -Nicolette Sowder
“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything.” -Albert Einstein
“Kids are born scientists. They’re born probing the natural world that surrounds them. They’ll lift up a rock. They’ll pick up a bug. They’ll pull petals off of a flower. They’ll ask you why the grass is green and the sky is blue, and they’ll experiment with breakable things indoor house. I think the best thing a parent can do, when raising a child, is simply get out of their way.”
neil degrasse tyson
“Times have changed, but children haven’t. Young kids are on the same evolutionary path they’ve always been on. It’s our expectations that are off. We’re trying to make children ready for the next stage of life before natural development allows them to be ready.” -Heather Shumaker
“Our challenge isn’t so much to teach children about the natural world, but to find ways to sustain instinctive connections they already carry.” -Terry Krautwurst
“Children more than ever need opportunities to be in their bodies in the world – jumping rope, bicycling, stream hopping, and fort building. It’s this engagement between limbs of the body and bones of the earth where true balance and centeredness emerge.” -David Sobel
“Time in nature is not a luxury. It is a necessity. And we must give our children time to explore, discover, and get to know the world, which brings endless delights and lessons that never cease.” -Ainsley Arment
Adventures Outside Quotes
“Your kids will remember the adventures you went on, not the stuff you bought them. Kids outgrow stuff; they never outgrow adventures.”
“As soon as I saw you, I knew a grand adventure was about to happen.” -A.A. Milne
“No, we don’t need more sleep. It’s our souls that are tired, not our bodies. We need nature. We need magic. We need adventure. We need freedom. We need truth. We need stillness. We don’t need more sleep, we need to wake up and live.” -Brooke Hampton
“Leave the road, take the trails.”
Pythagoras
“I think I’m quite ready for another adventure.” -J.R.R. Tolkien
Outdoors in All Weather Quotes
“Bad weather looks worse through a window.” -Tom Lehrer
“Encouraging a child to go outside in all weather builds resilience, but more importantly, it saves them from spending their lives merely tolerating the “bad” days in favor of a handful of “good” ones – a life of endless expectations and conditions where happiness hinges on sunshine.” -Nicolette Sowder
“If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy in your life but the same amount of snow.”
Unknown
“There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.” -Alfred Wainwright
Finding Our Home in Nature Quotes
“The human spirit needs a place where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of man.”
“The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth.” -Chief Seattle
“I always defined geology as not only understanding earth but understanding our place on earth.” -Lauret Savoy
“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” -Alexander Den Heijer
“The word ecology is derived from the Greek oikos, the word for home.”
robin Wall Kimmerer
Finding Ourselves in Nature Quotes
“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
“In nature, nothing is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways and they’re still beautiful.” -Alice Walker
“You are made from the same energy source that has created the oceans, the forests, the mountains, the valleys, and the stars in the sky.”
Unknown
“The things he sees are not just remembered; the form a part of his soul.” -Maria Montessori
“May your search through nature lead you to yourself.”
“Even the tiniest of flowers can have the toughest of roots.” -Shannon Mullen
“Nature is a tool to get children to experience not just the wider world, but themselves.” -Stephen Moss
“You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment.” -Thich Nhat Hanh
“I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.” -Henry David Throeau
Less Screen Time, More Playtime
“What would our lives be like if our days and nights were as immersed in nature as they are in technology?” -Richard Louv
“Kids don’t remember their best day of television.”
Unknown
“Some of the best moments are never captured by cameras and are not posted in any social media platforms. They are kept in private and are cherished together with the best people.”
“Play outside instead.”
“We know, too, that young people on average can recognize over 1,000 corporate logos but only a handful of plants and animals native to their places.” -Peter H. Kahn Jr. & Stephen R. Kellert
“Let’s raise children who can name more stars in the sky than stars on the screen.” -Nicolette Sowder
Nature-Loving Kids Quotes
“It’s a wondrous thing when the wild calms the child.”
“Let the children be free; encourage them; let them run outside when it is raining; let them remove their shoes when they find a puddle of water; and when the grass of the meadows is wet with dew, let them run on it and trample it with their bare feet; let them rest peacefully when a tree invites them to sleep beneath its shade; let them shout and laugh when the sun wakes them in the morning.”
Maria Montessori
“The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“All good things are wild and free.” -Henry David Thoreau
“Encourage your child to have muddy, grassy, or sandy feet by the end of each day; that’s the childhood they deserve.” -Penny Whitehouse
“We are all meant to be naturalists, each with his own degree, and it is inexcusable to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant and animal life and to care for none of these things.” -Charlotte Mason
“At the end of the day, your feet should be dirty, your hair should be messy, and your eyes sparkling.”
unknown
“I love the kind of tired that comes from a lot of fresh air and a little too much sun.”
“Step over ants, put worms back in the grass, rescue baby caterpillars, release spiders back into your garden, open windows for bees to fly home.”
“The mud will wash off, but the memories will last a lifetime.”
“Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat.” -Laura Ingalls Wilder
Future Planet Saver Quotes
“If we want children to flourish, to become truly empowered, let us allow them to love the earth before we ask them to save it.” – David Sobel
“We will conserve only what we love. We love only what we know. We know only what we are taught.” -Baba Dioum
“To raise a nature-bonded child is to raise a rebel, a dreamer, an innovator – someone who will walk their own verdant, winding path.” -Nicolette Sowder
“Children are born with a sense of wonder and an affinity for nature. Properly cultivated, these values can mature into ecological literacy. And eventually into sustainable patterns of living.” -Zenobia Barlow
“We cannot protect something we do not love, we cannot love what we do not know, and we cannot know what we do not see. Or hear. Or sense.”
Richard Louv
“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” -Vincent Van Gogh
“Because little nature lovers grow into big nature lovers.”
Intersectional Environmentalism Resources
I made the decision that we didn’t need more John Muir quotes.
Articles
- The Environmental Movement Needs to Reckon with Its Racist History by Julian Brave NoiseCat
- The Story We’ve Been Told About America’s National Parks Is Incomplete by Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Podcast
- We Been Out Here by Courtney Lanctot
These are wonderful!! And many apply to teens too lol.
Your site so makes me miss the toddler years (I’ve got big kids now!) :(. Such a great resource!!
I looove everything here. Thank you thank you thank you so much for sharing. Love from Indonesia 🙂
Love right back to you! 🙂
Loved the quotes about nature. You are amazing.
Thank you! You’re amazing too.