Wilderness Quotes

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

George Washington Sears

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.

Daniel J. Rice

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

Jay Woodman

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 list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time.

Bill McKibben

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?

Daniel J. Rice

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

Peter Geye

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

Timothy Goodwin

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

Sunday Adelaja

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.

Daniel J. Rice

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.

Eowyn Ivey

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

Nancy Wynne Newhall

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.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

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.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

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.

Peter Heller

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

T.F. Hodge

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.

Mireya Mayor

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 tragedy, as it would make it impossible for them to live there any longer. Could two cultures be any different? I now wondered. We were taking federal money to mine water and would do so until the unlikely day that same government made us stop. The Hopi had been trying to prevent the government from giving them a well in the first place.

Julene Bair

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

Langston Hughes

If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.

Edward Abbey

...environment scarcely recognises a political frontier.

T.C. Smout

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

Barry Babcock

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

Jim Kjelgaard

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.

Sylvia Dolson

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.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

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.

Aldo Leopold

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

Lailah Gifty Akita

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

Daniel J. Rice

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

Kat Kruger

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.

Shannon Mullen

The forest is blanketed by the greenest ferns and moss and bonsai-like trees, a wild majesty that beckons hobbits and pixies and elves and dreamers.

Shannon Mullen

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

Shannon Huffman Polson

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.

Daniel J. Rice

Wilds whisper, yet I long for their roar.

Gin Getz

Keep calm. You have the forest in your blood.

Nenia Campbell

Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

John Muir

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

E'yen A. Gardner

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.

J. Meredith Neil

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.

Daniel J. Rice

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.

Loren Eiseley

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.

C.J. Cherryh

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.

Haruki Murakami

A clarion call to the 7000 remnants who are yet to bow their knees to Baal, to arise and come out of the wilderness to take charge of the guard that would lead their Nations and church to the promise land

Sunday Adelaja

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

Daniel J. Rice

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 find it easy to indulge in the most ancient of all crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants burn his sweetheart's buttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest floor prick his knees, insects hers; and all around there abides a sustained rustle of potential snakes--que dis-je,of semi-extinct dragons!--while the crablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in a hideous green crust, to gartered black sock and sloppy white sock alike.

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Thomas Cole

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.

T.K. Whipple

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

Susan Oakey-Baker

Beautiful souls are shaped by ugly experiences.

Matshona Dhliwayo

the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.. live wild dont be a normal person.. to become presence, means accepting the risk.. and be sure if u don't take risks u'll have a wasted soul..

Marouane LAASSAFAR

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.

Daniel J. Rice

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

Daniel J. Rice

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.

Eowyn Ivey

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

Lailah Gifty Akita

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 yet another search for a durable scale of values. It is only the scholar who understands why the raw wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human enterprise.

Aldo Leopold

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.

Daniel J. Rice

There are no shortcuts through the wilderness of life.

Seth Adam Smith

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.

Robert W. Service

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.

Boyd Norton

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

T.F. Hodge

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 rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night.

Edward Abbey

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Wilderness Quotes

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