Quotes about wilderness

Get drunk by drinking the magical beauty and tranquil tonic of nature get lost in the wilderness.

Wilderness is wise civilization enjoys the joy of foolishness.

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.

No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.

I've always longed to have a patch of personal wilderness. Of waist-high grass entwined with wildflowers through which I can prance within which I can lie down and disappear from sight.

I watched the surrounding landscape with great curiosity, and I wanted to discover the words that could describe all its unspoiled beauty.

What else can we do in the wilderness, than to wonder?

She wasted and grew so thin that she no longer was a little girl, but the shadow of a little girl. The flame of her life flickered so faintly that it appeared sufficient to blow at it to extinguish it. Stas understood that death did not have to wait for a third attack to take her and he expected it any day or any hour.

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

Among wilderness survival tips, punching a wild animal in the face probably isn’t on a checklist.

The west coast is a mecca for wild hearts, wild minds, wild spirits and I’m a WMD—I’ve got so much energy I’m about to explode.

There seems to be no way to save wildness from human intrusion without establishing and enforcing rules and regulations that are themselves intrusions on what, by definition, are meant to be areas outside humanity's control.

As the saturating colors of sun-life fade from sight, the ominous moon reaches out its long arm and applies the dark dyes of night.

Tracks were adumbrations of the energy of life all about us, the recent history book of wilderness.

Wilds whisper, yet I long for their roar.

My hands are flowing like sunlight. The shapes and colors are astounding. I don't understand these images that are empowering me. My brush touches the canvas like photons to the earth, and a new world develops, free from my control, yet intrinsically dependent upon me. I am sweating with elation. I have no idea what I am doing, or what it is my hands are trying to see. There is so much strength in this clarity I am overpowered by the independence of it.

Keep calm. You have the forest in your blood.

Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

The wilderness is a place that every believer has to experience to be molded for their divine purpose.

He watched the desert slip under the airship's nose, and the land roughened into highlands over which he had traveled at great cost, in great pain - dreamlike, such speed, looking down on a world where time moved more slowly, where realities were different and immediate and he had learned for a time to live.

The people who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny that reality only at the risk of being driven into the wilderness yourself.

It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.

It is crucial that Jesus is led by the Spirit. There are two wildernesses, two darknesses in the spiritual journey. One you go into by your own stupidity, by your sin, blindness, ignorance and mistakes. We all do that. But there’s another darkness. The holy darkness is the darkness that God leads us into, through and beyond. This is a necessary darkness for the journey. In a certain sense, God’s darkness is a much better teacher than light. There comes a time when you have to either go deeper in

so wondrous wild, the whole might seemthe scenery of a fairy dream

I was disoriented by the idea that men should ever leave the forest.

When I returned to camp, they walked behind me on the trail, and we spoke not a word about getting skunked today, but rather talked about the days we returned with a stringer full of fish, and how we filleted them and the left the guts out for bears and eagles, and how those fish tasted fresh when we fried them over a fire.

Why is it that we don’t worry about a compass until we’re lost in a wilderness of our own making?

The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver--over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher thanthe wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a somber gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur.All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself. I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace. What were we w

My own experiences in the wild rank in value just behind the birth of my children, my wedding, and the memorial services and graduations I’ve attended. I am permanently affected by those solitary encounters with land, sky, and water, and all that’s contained within. I don’t really know if I am a better person because of them, but I am happier for them." Letters, The American Scholar, Autumn 2016

Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It's just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

Every night we stopped in a cabin where wood had been stacked, matches left, and canned goods laid out for the chance traveler. All the unknown host received in return was a scribbled note giving our thanks, any news we could think of, and our names. This whole system of northern hospitality was a gigantic chain, for while we were eating this man’s beans, he was undoubtedly farther up the trail, eating somebody else’s.

It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.

And it was in that moment of distress and confusion that the whip of terror laid its most nicely calculated lash about his heart. It dropped with deadly effect upon the sorest spot of all, completely unnerving him. He had been secretly dreading all the time that it would come - and come it did.Far overhead, muted by great height and distance, strangely thinned and wailing, he heard the crying voice of Defago, the guide.The sound dropped upon him out of that still, wintry sky with an effect of di

A man without enemies is a dishonest man.

Most often women want happiness and men want wilderness.

They can see the brave silhouette from almost anywhere in the District of Columbia and use it as a compass to locate other monuments and eventually to find their way out of the great, gray federal wilderness.

We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.

To the lover of wilderness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.

One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.

Be bored and see where it takes you, because the imagination's dusty wilderness is worth crossing if you want to sculpt your soul.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

The spirit of L.A. is untamed wilderness. It's earthquakes and wildfires and oceans and mountain lions and fog. There's great physical beauty.

I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.

Every falling leaf reminds me that I too will soon be separated from these trees. Trying to capture freedom is like trying to catch a falling leaf. Occasionally you may grab one out of the air and hold it in your hands, but now what?

I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That

There was a wildness inside him; someday he would capture it. Not to be tamed, but to be released. For only by understanding his mind could it be freed.

We are the wilderness withinScreaming out for true expression.Even when we’re sleeping,There’s no escape from this obsession.

For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats;And men are whithered before their primeBy the curse paved in with the lanes and streets.And lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed, In the smothering reek of mill and mine;And death stalks in on the struggling crowd—But he shuns the shadow of the oak and pine

When you are facing the wilderness on your own, you have a totally different attitude to someone who works in government or who has a monthly cheque.

I thought how wise he was to lure his rival out into the woods, where every fight's fair.

It’s mostly during times of wilderness experience, that people are willing to accept the lessonsthat wisdom teaches

We smoked fat cigars by the campfire and they tasted like wood and ash. The inhale and exhale was exciting. Blowing smoke rings in the calm forest air was followed by a deep swallow of cheap beer, and this too was exciting. There was no judgment in the wild, and so indulgences were plentiful. There were no regulators here and we were free to indulge in the deep intoxications that made our minds free.

...we do not own these woods. They own us.

You carry the message you've been seeking, but realization of it is found in healthy retrospection, not among the wilderness of chaotic noise.

He stood there a moment, listened to the creek, and let the mountain air blow against his face. Even with all this heartache, it was beautiful here.

The Wilderness holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask.

...environment scarcely recognises a political frontier.

...no other life form needed man, man needed all the others in which to survive.

If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.

Slowly, deliberately, the dog turned from the black wolf and walked toward the man. He was a dog, and dogs chose men.

If you reconnect with nature and the wilderness you will not only find the meaning of life, but you will experience what it means to be truly alive.

At most, a hundred paces separated him from them. The powerful beast, seeing the riders and horses, rose on his fore paws and began to gaze at them. The sun, which now stood low, illuminated his huge head and shaggy breasts, and in that ruddy luster he was like one of those sphinxes which ornament the entrances to ancient Egyptian temples.

The shots had dispersed the birds; there remained only two marabous, standing between ten and twenty paces away and plunged in reverie. They were like two old men with bald heads pressed between the shoulders.

Maybe freedom really is nothing left to lose. You had it once in childhood, when it was okay to climb a tree, to paint a crazy picture and wipe out on your bike, to get hurt. The spirit of risk gradually takes its leave. It follows the wild cries of joy and pain down the wind, through the hedgerow, growing ever fainter. What was that sound? A dog barking far off? That was our life calling to us, the one that was vigorous and undefended and curious.

Every morning in the middle of nowhere, without electricity or anyone to impress, I'd take great care in picking out my outfit and hover in front of a business card-size mirror to apply my lip gloss and check my eyebrows. I also felt I had a strong case for bringing a little black dress on expeditions. Village parties spring up more often than you might expect, and despite never having been a Girl Scout, I like to be prepared.

James hoped the newsletter would garner support from Bahana, or white people, to stop a town well that the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted to dig and a tower it wanted to erect to store the water. The Hotevilla elders were willing to lay down their lives in this battle. They’d done it before, preventing the BIA from bringing electricity to the village by lying down in front of bulldozers. If that well went in, James explained, people would waste water. Their spring would dry out- an unthinkable

The sea is a desert of waves,A wilderness of water.

Life in the wild, as I’m observing, is about survival as much as pleasure.

Beyond the wall of the unreal city … there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then —May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattles

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch o

There is language going on out there- the language of the wild. Roars, snorts, trumpets, squeals, whoops, and chirps all have meaning derived over eons of expression... We have yet to become fluent in the language -and music- of the wild.

One who be armed with positive force energy may repell negative daggers, walk through the wilderness - and live to tell it.

Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wantingSo much as just finding the gold.It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,It's the forests where silence has lease;It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,It's the stillness that fills me with peace.

The contemplative man always lives alone. Regardless of who may reside in his home, his is a solitary world.

There's been a lot to get used to here." Esther laughed. "Isn't that the truth. I don't know if you ever get used to it really. It just gets in your blood so that you can't stand to be anywhere else.

I walked slowly to enjoy this freedom, and when I came out of the mountains, I saw the sky over the prairie, and I thought that if heaven was real, I hoped it was a place I never had to go, for this earth was greater than any paradise.

The wilderness is a place of an encounter with the Creator.

There are no shortcuts through the wilderness of life.

Though American scenery is destitute of many of those circumstances that give value to the European, still it has features, and glorious ones, unknown to Europe...the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness

They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and kissed on the trim turf of old-world mountainsides, on the innerspring moss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic benches under the initialed oaks, and in so many cabanes in so so many beech forests. But in the Wilds of America the open-air lover will not

Only lost photographs that were never taken know what my mind speaks of when we are alone together.

I didn’t say a word. He wouldn’t be using oxygen. K2 is more dangerous than Everest.

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.

If you have not touched the rocky wall of a canyon. If you have not heard a rushing river pound over cobblestones. If you have not seen a native trout rise in a crystalline pool beneath a shattering riffle, or a golden eagle spread its wings and cover you in shadow. If you have not seen the tree line recede to the top of a bare crested mountain. If you have not looked into a pair of wild eyes and seen your own reflection. Please, for the good of your soul, travel west.

Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who prate of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years. It is only the scholar who appreciates that all history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize

The world of wonder is wonderful wilderness.

My wilderness training was 4 years and 10 months of solitude, search and study.

But it was Aldo’s pen that became his most forceful tool. He started a newsletter for rangers called the Carson Pine Cone. Aldo used it to “scatter seeds of knowledge, encouragement, and enthusiasm.” Most of the Pine Cone’s articles, poems, jokes, editorials, and drawings were Aldo’s own. His readers soon realized that the forest animals were as important to him as the trees. His goal was to bring back the “flavor of the wilds.

Wilderness gave us knowledge. Wilderness made us human. We came from here. Perhaps that is why so many of us feel a strong bond to this land called Serengeti it is the land of our youth.

One who will not accept solitude, stillness and quiet recurring moments...is caught up in the wilderness of addictions; far removed from an original state of being and awareness. This is 'dis-ease.

...William Stegner...coined the term 'the geography of hope,' countering the argument that wilderness preservation served elites with the assertion that wilderness could be a place in which everyone could locate their hopefulness even if few actually entered it.

There, about a dozen times during the day, the wind drives over the sky the swollen clouds, which water the earth copiously, after which the sun shines brightly, as if freshly bathed, and floods with a golden luster the rocks, the river, the trees, and the entire jungle.

There is always an adventure waiting in the woods.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.