We’ve compiled a list of our favorite hunting quotes that all hunters and outdoor enthusiasts will enjoy.
Hunting is the pursuit, capture, or killing of wild or feral animals. Some people may not see the positive things that come with hunting. But, if they opened their minds a bit more, they might see a whole different side to this outdoor activity.
So, if you want to try this hobby, read and reflect on the following quotes.
Maybe you’ll also get to see why some well-known personalities love this activity so much!
Start reading here.
And don’t forget to check out these country quotes and deer quotes.
Best Hunting Quotes
1. “Hunting is about the journey, not the outcome.” – Anonymous
2. “A hunt based only on trophies taken falls far short of what the ultimate goal should be.” – Fred Bear
3. “Hunting and fishing involve killing animals with devices—such as guns—for which the animals have not evolved natural defenses.” – Marc Bekoff
4. “Hunting forces a person to endure, to master themselves, even to truly get to know the wild environment. Actually, along the way, hunting and fishing make you fall in love with the natural world. This is why hunters so often give back by contributing to conservation.” – Donald Trump, Jr.
5. “Hunting is not a sport. In a sport, both sides should know they’re in the game.” – Paul Rodriguez
6. “Hunting provided us with an ever scarcer relationship in a world of cities, factory farms, and agribusiness, direct responsibility for taking the lives that sustained us.” – Ted Kerasote
7. “The old man used to say that the best part of hunting and fishing was the thinking about going and then talking about it after you got back.” – Robert Ruark
8. “Hunting has opened the earth to me and let me sense the rhythms and hierarchies of nature.” – Charles Fergus
9. “To hunt successfully, you must know your ground, your pack, and your quarry.” – K.J. Parker
10. “If you consider an unsuccessful hunt to be a waste of time, then the true meaning of the chase eludes you all together.” – Fred Bear
Meaningful Hunting Quotes
11. “Hunting teaches you patience, discipline, ethics, sustainability, appreciation, confidence, perseverance, and hard work.” – Anonymous
12. “Hunting is not a ‘blood sport’ it is a sport that is in my blood.” – Anonymous
13. “Girls who like hunting, fishing, and guns aren’t weird. They’re a gift from God.” – Anonymous
14. “God grant me serenity. To accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know when to just go hunting.” – Anonymous
15. “You must not only aim right but draw the bow with all your might.” – Henry David Thoreau
16. “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 Bear
17. “In hunting—as in life—sometimes the things you need most aren’t the thing you went looking for.” – Anonymous
18. “When entering an ecosystem with the intent to hunt, honorable hunters pay their respects.” – Jessica Marie Baumgartner
19. “No matter what happens, whether you succeed or not, if you stand up and do it right and pay attention, hunting will always give you what you need. It may not be what you were looking for, but it will absolutely be important enough to justify whatever you do.” – Jacob Bowers
20. “In matters like hunting and fishing and falconry, mentors are priceless. They teach you nuance, and detail, and what is really important.” – Charles Fergus
21. “If I feel free when I hunt, then when I write about hunting I genuinely reproduce that pleasant feeling. I am almost free.” – Miguel Delibes
22. “For us hunting wasn’t a sport. It was a way to be intimate with nature, that intimacy providing us with wild unprocessed food free from pesticides and hormones and with the bonus of having been produced without the addition of great quantities of fossil fuel.” – Ted Kerasote
23. “In the joy of hunting is intimately woven the love of the great outdoors. The beauty of woods, valleys, mountains, and skies feeds the soul of the sportsman where the quest of game only whets his appetite.” – Dr. Saxton Pope
24. “Hunting has the potential to balance one’s entire being.” – Jessica Marie Baumgartner
25. “It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.” – Samuel Johnson
Also read: Quotes to Live By
Short Hunting Quotes
26. “If I’ve gone missing, I’ve gone hunting.” – Anonymous
27. “There is no hunting but with old hounds.” – French Proverb
28. “Every day is a good day when you hunt.” – Anonymous
29. “Hunting: the least honorable form of war on the weak.” – Paul Richard
30. “Life is short. Call in late and go hunting.” – Anonymous
31. “Deer hunting would be a fine sport if only the deer had guns.” – W. S. Gilbert
32. “Father and daughter. Hunting partners for life.” – Anonymous
33. “For some, hunting is a hobby. For me, it is a passion.” – Anonymous
34. “Sometimes hunting is the only thing that makes sense.” – Anonymous
35. “Fishing solves most of my problems. Hunting solves the rest.” – Anonymous
36. “Nothing clears a troubled mind like shooting a bow.” – Fred Bear
37. “A bad day hunting still beats a good day working.” – Anonymous
38. “Hunting is not a proper employment for a thinking man.” – Joseph Addison
Also read: Short Quotes
Deep Hunting Quotes
39. “Everybody wants to eat but few are willing to hunt.” – Anonymous
40. “Hunting is a relic of barbarism that once thirsted for human blood but is now content with the blood of animals.” – Christian Nestell Bovee
41. “Like any craft and tradition, hunting too can be shared and passed down generations. From the dawn of man to our own age, the hunting party is a well-worn staple of masculinity.” – Ryan Landry
42. “The history of the bow and arrow is the history of mankind.” – Fred Bear
43. “Hunting is not a hobby. It’s a post-apocalyptic survival skill.” – Anonymous
44. “Hunting is part of a cycle of life that repeats. Life. Death. Life. Death. Death is part of life.” – Roberto Baggio
45. “You let me hunt is like saying you let me breathe.” – Jase Robertson
46. “The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
47. “If you are not working to protect hunting, then you are working to destroy it.” – Fred Bear
48. “There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.” – Charles Dickens
49. “Hunting is a manly exercise, and therefore a proper recreation. But it is the business of a knight-errant to rid the world of other sorts of animals than foxes.” – Henry Fielding
50. “You can see the true heart of a man when you’re out in the woods with a weapon.” – Jase Robertson
51. “The hunter that travels out into the woods is lost to the world, yet finds himself.” – Anonymous
52. “To remain a hunter is to be too bonded to nature to ever be able to fully master the animal, or to escape its fate.” – James Martel
Interesting Hunting Quotes to Make You Think
53. “Some people ask why men go hunting. They must be the kind of people who seldom get far from highways. What do they know of the tryst a hunting man keeps with the wind and the trees and the sky? Hunting? The means are greater than the end, and every hunt?” – Gordon Macquarrie
54. “I did not mind killing anything, any animal, if I killed it cleanly, they all had to die and my interference with the nightly and the seasonal killing that went on all the time was very minute and I had no guilty feeling at all. We ate the meat and kept the hides and horns.” – Ernest Hemingway
55. “If some animals are good at hunting and others are suitable for hunting, then the gods must clearly smile on hunting.” – Aristotle
56. “As all hunters, the people of the Americas relied on the skills of stalking, tracking, and trapping to get close to their quarry, so the range and power of the weapon were not so important as the craft of hunting.” – Robert Hardy
57. “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and like it, never care for anything else thereafter.” – Ernest Hemingway
58. “The excellent people who protest against all hunting, and consider sportsmen as enemies of wildlife, are ignorant of the fact that in reality, the genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination.” – Theodore Roosevelt
59. “The hunting partnership between man and dog developed thousands of years ago and from it came a deep bond of affection. I suspect it was the dog’s idea.” – Aaron Fraser
60. “The best thing about hunting and fishing is that you don’t have to actually do it to enjoy it. You can go to bed every night thinking about how much fun you had 20 years ago, and it all comes back clear as moonlight.” – Robert Ruark
Funny Hunting Quotes
61. “Imagine life without hunting. Now slap yourself and never do it again.” – Anonymous
62. “The couple that hunts together stays together—or kills each other, one of the two.” – Anonymous
63. “My biggest fear is that when I die, my wife will sell my hunting gear for what I said I paid for it.” – Anonymous
64. “I don’t always tell people where I hunt, but when I do, it’s a lie.” – Dos Equis
65. “Why do you wear pink camo? Are you going to hunt flamingos?” – Anonymous
66. “Do you know what I love about hunting? That I am no one in the woods, no one at all. I thought the animals might recognize me, but they didn’t. They did not even ask me for any autographs.” – Zlatan Ibrahimovic
67. “If the hunter comes back with mushrooms, don’t ask him how his hunt was.” – Ghanaian Proverb
Also read: Funny Quotes
Hunting Quotes That’ll Show You What It’s Like to Be a Woodsman
68. “The true trophy hunter is a self-disciplined perfectionist seeking a single animal, the ancient patriarch well past his prime that is often an outcast of his own kind. If successful, he will enshrine the trophy in a place of honor. This is a more noble and fitting end than dying on some lost and lonely ledge where the scavengers will pick his bones, and his magnificent horns will weather away and be lost forever.” – Elgin Gates
69. “Through almost all of human existence, huntable land, and huntable wildlife have preceded the hunter. They caused the hunter but in the future, this must be reversed. It is the hunter who must cause huntable land and wildlife, and a world worth being young in.” – John Madison
70. “When a hunter is in a treestand with moral values and with the proper hunting ethics and richer for the experience, that hunter is 20 feet closer to God.” – Fred Bear
71. “The truth is—I’m always saddened when I kill an animal. It’s not remorse I feel, I know why I’m a hunter. It’s out of respect.” – Donnie Vincent
72. “A hunter stalks his prey. There is always an invisible wall between him and the animal he hunts. Compared to a photographer or an artist, a hunter is a stranger in the forest. A hunter can shatter the invisible wall with one shot, but he can never simply walk through it.” – Kathryn Lasky
73. “The hunter never hates his quarry; it’s a thing which he wants to get, to reduce into possession, so how could he hate it?” – K. J. Parker
74. “A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than that of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.” – Aldo Leopold
75. “You can learn more about bow hunting a deer in a week than a gun hunter will learn in his entire life.” – Anonymous
76. “The amateur hunter is heard on the hill. You’d better be doing a get-away stunt or your person with buckshot he’s likely to fill.” – Arthur G. Burgoyne
77. “A hunter is a peculiar type of character much given to solitude if he is a true predator.” – David Brian Plummer
78. “A hunter should be well acquainted with his hunting backgrounds, one miss and he could suffer a fortune.” – Anonymous
79. “Some may think that hunters are cruel people and that the blood and death of animals give them pleasure. Oh, it is not so, Gentlemen! I knew many hunters who could not watch others butcher a calf or a rooster. They were not even able to finish off an injured game animal, because they had such soft, kind hearts!” – A. A. Cherkasov
80. “The emotions that good hunters need to cultivate are love and service more than courage. The sentiments of the hunt then become translated into art.” – James Swan
Hunting Quotes for You to Enjoy
81. “Leashed hounds have ways intended to set us guessing. That the hunting is better than it is, to be gone. From restraint of the leash, to be ever circling and pressing outward along the trails that lure them on.” – Glenn Ward Dresbach
82. “What that little thing which passed by me just there, is that what they’re hunting—is that called a hare? And are all these horses, these dogs and these men, employed in pursuing that little thing then?” – S. G. H.
83. “Hi! handsome hunting man, fire your little gun. Bang! Now the animal is dead and dumb and done. Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again, eat or sleep or drink again. Oh, what fun!” – Walter de la Mare
84. “The dusky night rides down the sky, and ushers in the morn; the hounds all join in glorious cry, the huntsman winds his horn, and a-hunting we will go.” – Henry Fielding
85. “I’m going hunting, I’m the hunter. I’ll bring back the goods, but I don’t know when.” – Björk
More Hunting Quotes That Everyone Can Agree On
86. “For people who grew up hunting, especially war veterans, shooting often settled the mind. It was something that required full concentration, and therefore took you away from your troubles, at least for a short time.” – Taya Kyle
87. “Without hunting there would be no conservation, without conservation, there would be no wildlife.” – Rob Keck
88. “Going to war without France is like going hunting without an accordion.” – Norman Schwarzkopf
89. “Whether hunting is right or wrong, a spiritual experience, or an outlet for the killer instinct, one thing it is not is a sport.” – R. Lerner
90. “Respect your prey: many native American tribes would forbid a hunter from celebrating his kill, it was thought to insult the animal’s spirit and would bring bad luck.” – Anonymous
What Are Your Thoughts on Hunting?
Hunting is a hobby for many people, but it is also considered a crime in many countries. Nonetheless, even after millions of years of evolution, this practice has persisted and is still practiced today.
While hunting is a controversial issue, there are compelling arguments both for and against it. The main disadvantage is that it is a risky activity. Aside from the possibility of hurting yourself, it may also lead to animal suffering and abusive practices.
Hunting is the primary method to control wildlife populations. But, it also guides you when it comes to mastering yourself and teaching yourself how to survive in the wild. It is an activity that teaches you patience, discipline, hard work, and ethics as well.
Indeed, hunting and spending quality time in the great outdoors provide us with time to relax. There’s so much more to hunting, and whenever you need a reminder, feel free to reread our collection!
Have you tried hunting before? Are you for it or against it? Let’s discuss your opinions in the comments section below!
