Many quarries are exploited to provide construction material due to rapid progress of urbanization and industrialization. Exploitation of quarries causes lots of bare rock slopes, resulting in complete removal of vegetation and propagules, soil depletion, and landscape fragmentation. The soil erosion causes an impoverishment of nutritional and hydric status, hindering natural germination and establishment of young plants. As a result, the reutilization of abandoned quarries becomes quite difficult. The destruction of vegetation is the major factor that leads to the ecosystem degradation. Revegetation of abandoned quarries is the key to improving the ecological environment. Low water and nutrient availabilities are the primary factors limiting plant development at quarries. The establishment of a plant community is often quite low and limits the success of revegetation. Natural restoration is a very slow process, which may take hundreds of years. As a result, artificial revegetation methods have been widely used in ecology restoration of abandoned quarries. Soil management, slope stabilization, species selection, seed collection, seeding and planting strategies and techniques are recommended practices. Treatments with fertilizer may promise procedures to improve plant performance in the site with low water and nutrient availabilities. Artificial restoration of abandoned quarries should be based on spontaneous succession, which could guide artificial practices. At the early stages of vegetation succession, abiotic factors play a key role, and biotic factors become more important as the succession proceeds. Soil accumulation on the rocky slope face is a key factor for vegetation establishment at the early successional stages, but it is very difficult to retain soil on a rocky slope surface due to high rates of water erosion resulting from rainfall influence. In addition, extreme low and high temperatures and drought are the most limiting factors on these sites for plant establishment. Whether there are soil and propagulum being spread through external forces from neighboring natural vegetation will decide the success at starting stage of the succession. Besides the abiotic factors and other constraints, the arrival of some species before other species determines the course of succession through shifts in competitive abilities. Disturbances often become the important driving force of succession process. Physical stability of bare rock slopes could affect the vegetation restoration significantly, and addition of organic waste and fertilization may change or determine the direction of biodiversity of restoration succession. Sowing or planting certain plants could potentially modify the restoration successional direction, and speed up restoration succession. Native species, which has adapted to the local climate, can promote restoration succession. Organic matter, vegetation coverage, species richness and soil microbial biomass increase with increasing restoration age. Future research should focus on the studies of selection and breeding of species which applied in the abandoned quarries restoration in different regions, functional characteristics of native species, dynamics of soil microbial community and soil enzyme, positioning studies of vegetation succession process, interspecific competition among restoration vegetation, comparison of spontaneous succession and artificial restoration, exploring cost-effective methods of abandoned quarries restoration, and so on.