Some are funny, some are poignant, and some are inspirational, but all the entries on this list of the best hunting quotes help explain the complicated subject of hunting in their own way.

Every hunter knows that there is far more to the act of hunting than merely going afield and killing game. While some people do a better job of explaining this than others, describing the many feelings and emotions involved with hunting is a challenging task. Fortunately, some incredibly eloquent wordsmiths have come before us and put their wisdom onto paper. I’ve collected some of the best hunting quotes that I feel do the finest job of articulating the mixture of beauty, sorrow, amazement, and joy that we all encounter when we go afield.
Some of the best hunting quotes are excerpts from great hunting books. Others are just bits of knowledge shared by an individual who had a knack for certain way with words. Regardless of where they come from, if you read them carefully and take some time to digest the sentiments they convey, these hunting quotes will speak to your soul.
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Hunting vs Killing

We’ll start off with a few classic hunting quotes that explore the reasons why people hunt as well as the difference between “hunting” and “killing.”
To sum up, one does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted. If one were to present the sportsman with the death of the animal as a gift he would refuse it. What he is after is having to win it, to conquer the surly brute through his own effort and skill with all the extras that this carries with it: the immersion in the countryside, the healthfulness of the exercise, the distraction from his job.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset (Meditations on Hunting)
Go afield with a good attitude, with respect for the wildlife you hunt and for the forest and fields in which you walk. Immerse yourself in the outdoor experience. It will cleanse your soul and make you a better person.
-Fred Bearbest hunting quotes clense your soulHunting is the noblest sport yet devised by the hand of man. There were mighty hunters in the Bible, and all the caves where the cave men lived are full of carvings of assorted game the head of the house drug home. If you hunt to eat, or hunt for sport for something fine, something that will make you proud, and make you remember every single detail of the day you found him and shot him, that is good too. But if there’s one thing I despise it’s a killer, some blood-crazy idiot that just goes around bam-bamming at everything he sees. A man who takes pleasure in death just for death’s sake is rotten somewhere inside, and you’ll find him doing things later on in life that’ll prove it.
-Robert Ruark (The Old Man and the Boy)
Now then, get your equipment–your quiver and bow–and go out to the open country to hunt some wild game for me.
-Genesis 27:3
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
Maybe stalking the woods is as vital to the human condition as playing music or putting words to paper. Maybe hunting has as much of a claim on our civilized selves as anything else. After all, the earliest forms of representational art reflect hunters and prey. While the arts were making us spiritually viable, hunting did the heavy lifting of not only keeping us alive, but inspiring us. To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way.
-Steven Rinella (Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter)
If some animals are good at hunting and others are suitable for hunting, then the Gods must clearly smile on hunting.
-Aristotle
Death by violence, death by cold, death by starvation, – these are the normal endings of the stately and beautiful creatures of the wilderness. The sentimentalists who prattle about the peaceful life of nature do not realize its utter mercilessness;…Life is hard and cruel for all the lower creatures, and for man also in what the sentimentalists call a “state of nature.”
-Theodore Roosevelt (African Game Trails)