Are a fan of camping or planning do some camping this summer?
As a lifelong reader and an English literature graduate, I love collecting quotes — both inspirational and hilarious — and these quotes about camping are no exception.
I’ve gathered a bunch of my favorite camping quotes which range from the beautiful to the funny, as well as several short camping captions for Instagram in case these camping quotes are too long.
These camping quotes make perfect camping Instagram captions, but they’re also great for journaling, inspiring future travels, journal prompts, vision boards, etc.
Table of Contents
Most Inspiring Camping 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
“The glories of a mountain campfire are far greater than may be guessed.”
— John Muir
“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
“My wish is to stay always like this, living quietly in a corner of nature.”
— Claude Monet
“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
“The farther one gets into the wilderness, the greater is the attraction of its lonely freedom.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
“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
“The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule.”
— Giorgio Agamben
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep…”
Robert Frost
“A perfect day would be to get into the car, drive out to Yosemite, and go camping.”
— Michael Steger
“There is nothing worse, after days of falling asleep by a babbling brook and waking up to a choir chirping birds, than to go inside a house with insulated walls and an obstructive roof. This torturous invention, a cage, a box, prevents you from seeing or hearing anything of natural importance. Make time to free yourself and find a bit of nature.”
― Katherine Keith
“Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.”
— Alexander Eliot
Camping Quotes About Learning from Nature
“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”
— Anne Lamott
“Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach of us more than we can ever learn from books.”
— John Lubbock
“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity.”
— John Muir
“The wilderness holds answers to questions we have not yet learned to ask.”
— Nancy Wynne Newhall
“If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’ll bet they’d live a lot differently.”
— Bill Watterson
“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my sense put in order.”
— John Burroughs
“The greatest threat to the planet is the belief someone else will take care of it.”
— Robert Swan
“You don’t have to say everything to be a light. Sometimes a fire built on a hill will bring interested people to your campfire.”
― Shannon L. Alder
“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”
— Albert Einstein
“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
” In the woods we return to reason and faith.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Camping Quotes About the Beauty of Camping
“Sleep under a blanket of stars, and your heart will forever be kept warm by your love of life.”
— Anthony T. Hincks
“How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!”
— John Muir
“Perhaps there is no thrill so great as that which comes with a walk in the freshness of morning air.”
― Helen Keller
“And at the end of the day, your feet should be dirty, your hair messy and your eyes sparkling.”
— Shanti
“It is almost impossible to watch a sunset and not dream.”
— Bern Williams
“Light a campfire and everyone’s a storyteller.”
— John Geddes
“Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night.”
― Cheryl Strayed
“The fire is the main comfort of camp, whether in summer or winter.”
— Henry David Thoreau
“A crude meal, no doubt, but the best of all sauces is hunger.”
― Edward Abbey
“Cooking and eating food outdoors makes it taste infinitely better than the same meal prepared and consumed indoors.”
― Fennel Hudson
“The more civilized man becomes, the more he needs and craves a great background of forest wildness, to which he may return like a contrite prodigal from the husks of an artificial life.”
— Ellen Burns Sherman
“In a cool solitude of trees, where leaves and birds a music spin, mind that was weary is at ease, new rhythms in the soul begin.”
— William Kean Seymour
“Whatever form it takes, camping is earthy, soul enriching and character building, and there can be few such satisfying moments as having your tent pitched and the smoke rising from your campfire as the golden sun sets on the horizon – even if it’s just for a fleeting moment before the rain spoils everything.”
— Pippa Middleton
“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery. Air, mountains, tree, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.'”
— Sylvia Plath
“A great many people, and more all the time, live their entire lives without ever once sleeping out under the stars.”
— Alan S. Kesselheim
“You may be a little cold some nights on mountain tops above the timber-line, but you will see the stars, and by and by you can sleep enough in your town bed. or at least in your grave. Keep awake while you may in mountain mansions so rare.”
― John Muir
“We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.”
— Henry David Thoreau
“I just want to live in a world of mountains, coffee, campfires, cabins, and golden trees, and run around with a camera and notebook, learning the inner workings of everything real.”
— Victoria Erickson
“To wake up on a gloriously bright morning, in a tent pitched beneath spruce trees, and to look out lazily and sleepily for a moment from the open side of the tent, across the dead camp-fire of the night before… or to wake at night, when you have rolled in your blankets in the frost-stricken dying grass without a tent, and to look up through the leaves above to the dark sky and the flashing stars, and hear far off the call of a night bird or the howl of a wolf: this is the poetry, the joy of a wild and roving existence, which cannot come too often”
― Josiah Edward Spurr
“Wilderness is not a luxury but necessity of the human spirit.”
— Edward Abbey
“Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.”
— Charles Lindbergh
“Roses are red, mud is brown, the wood are better than any night on the town.”
— Earl Dibbles Jr
“If I went on vacation, I’d rather go camping than stay in some four-star hotel.”
— Travis Fimmel
Funny Camping Quotes
“Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong.”
— George Carlin
“It always rains on tents. Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent.”
— Dave Barry
“The ultimate camping trip was the Lewis and Clark expedition.”
— Dave Barry
“Camping is not a date; it’s an endurance test. If you can survive camping with someone, you should marry them on the way home.”
— Yvonne Prinz
“Camping is nature’s way of promoting the motel business.”
— Dave Barry
“Fires will rage in California. And I’ll wake from nightmares of lions at my tent. And I’ll feel like a crazy person when I talk to people about the trail. And I’ll ache to come back.”
― Luke Healy
“There is no such thing as bad weather, just soft people.”
— Bill Bowerman
“The stars were better company anyway. They were very beautiful, and they almost never snored.”
— David Eddings
“My tent doesn’t look like much but, as an estate agent might say, “It is air-conditioned and has exceptional location.”
― Fennel Hudson
“Of course, not everybody likes camping trips. I do not myself enjoy them much, because I’m not outdoorsy, or at any rate, I’m not outdoorsy overnight-without-a-matress-wise. There’s a limit to the outdoorsiness to which some academics can be expected to submit.”
― G.A. Cohen
“Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing. I suppose some will wish to debate whether it is important to keep these primitive arts alive. I shall not debate it. Either you know it in your bones, or you are very, very old.”
― Aldo Leopold
“Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing every year, but I told that story around the campfire and nobody got scared.”
— Jack Handey
“I married a woman who loves to camp, and I am what you would call indoorsy… My wife always brings up, Camping’s a tradition in my family. Hey, it was a tradition in everyone’s family ’til we came up with the house.”
— Jim Gaffigan
“In a well-ordered universe… camping would take place indoors.”
— Morgan Matson
“I went camping for 33 days, and now everybody seems to care.”
— Colleen Haskell
“My fear of camping: I’m convinced bugs will crawl up my va*** and lay eggs. Isn’t everyone?” ― Kathy Griffin
“Campgrounds are never comfortable. They are merely less awful than other options. In normal circumstances, if told that the nearest available toilet was half a mile away, up a dirt path frequented by animals in gastric distress, one would lock the doors and speed to civilization. When a tent or camper is involved, one is jubilant. At least this site had flush toilets!”
― Thomm Quackenbush
“I’ve been camping and stuff, but if you left me in the woods I’d probably just curl up and cry until someone found me.”
Norman Reedus
“Is it weird that I’m taking Louis Vuitton camping?”
— Jessica Simpson
“Escape to nature is not only a simple escape from stupidities in the city, but also a great refreshment to better fight fools and stupidities when you return to the city!”
― Mehmet Murat Ildan
“I think camping is one of those things where if you’re forced into it as a child, you’ll probably hate it as an adult.”
— Jeremy Irvine
“How is it that one match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box of matches to start a campfire?”
— Christy Whitehead
“What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die of course. Literally sh** myself lifeless.”
― Bill Bryson
“I got into an argument with a girlfriend inside of a tent. That’s a bad place for an argument, because then I tried to walk out and slammed the flap. How are you supposed to express your anger in this situation? Zipper it up really quick?”
– Mitch Hedberg
“Anna had read books about people in the cities going camping. They would leave their comfortable homes and beds and deliberately sleep in tents, on the ground, then cook their food outside over an open fire instead of in a well-stocked kitchen. She couldn’t imagine something so ridiculous.”
― Gail Sattler
“What’s that?”
“French press.”
“For coffee? Real coffee? Not instant?”
“We’re camping, Zorie, not living in a dystopian nightmare.”
― Jenn Bennett
Funny Camping Captions & Anonymous Quotes
“Camping: The art of getting closer to nature while getting farther away from the nearest cold beverage, hot shower, and flush toilet.”
“Donating blood, one mosquito at a time.”
“A bad day camping is still better than a good day working.”
“Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy a camper, which is kind of the same thing.”
“It’s all good in the woods.”
“Camping is in tents!” (like this camping pun? I’ve thought of 33 others, plus a few below!)
“I camp believe you don’t like nature.”
“May the forest be with you!”
“Life is s’more fun with friends.”
Inspiring Camping Captions & Anonymous Quotes
“There’s no WiFi in the mountains, but you’ll find no better connection.”
“I am most alive among the tall trees.”
“I don’t need a therapist. I go camping often.”
“Time camping isn’t time spent, it’s time invested.”
“Away is a place where it’s not about the money you spend. It’s about the moments you share.”
“Camp more. Worry less.”
Pin These Camping Quotes & Camping Captions!
Allison Green is a former teacher who has been travel blogging since 2016. She has a Masters in Teaching and a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. Her blog posts merge her background as an educator with her experience traveling to 70+ countries to encourage ethical, meaningful travel. She has been a speaker at the World Travel Writers Conference and her writing, photography, and podcasting work has appeared in National Geographic, CNN Arabic, CBC Canada, and Forbes, amongst others. Now a full-time traveler, she has lived in Prague, Sofia, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
I love these camping quotes! They’re perfect for Instagram!
Yay great! That was the hope 🙂