Wilderness Quotes - Page 2

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

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 or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.

Robert Macfarlane

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 into faith or you will turn back, when you have to live without knowing or you lose faith altogether. So we have the Spirit leading Jesus into the wilderness, to face the essential darkness.

Richard Rohr

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.

Daniel J. Rice

A man without enemies is a dishonest man.

Daniel J. Rice

Most often women want happiness and men want wilderness.

Debasish Mridha

There are places which exist in this world beyond the reach of imagination.

Daniel J. Rice

We had no choice. Sadness was a dangerous as panthers and bears. the wilderness needs your whole attention.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

I wondered what those mountains behind them might tell me, what advice they would give, if they could talk. What they would tell me about love, and about loss, and about how this wild place could heal as naturally as it could kill.

Shannon Huffman Polson

Honoring a life is honoring the wide open space of wilderness and unknowing where the sacred dwells.

Shannon Huffman Polson

Forgiveness is alchemy of the soul in which the feeling of possibility returns to the human spirit.

Jake Ducey

The wilderness is a seed of words.

Lailah Gifty Akita

In the wilderness, our faith is tested, and God faithfulness is manifested.

Lailah Gifty Akita

The past and the future were starlight, seemingly so close, but forever out of reach. Eli felt that starlight, the infinity of knowing nothing but his finite existence.

Daniel J. Rice

Priceless diamonds often shape in worthless dirt.

Matshona Dhliwayo

When you pray for a rainbow you pray for rain too.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Pain in the wilderness is an investment in pleasure in the Promised Land.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

...and she would wonder if one can truly stop the inevitable. Was it as Ada had suggested, that we can choose our own endings, joy over sorrow? Or does the cruel world just give and take, give and take, while we flounder through the wilderness?

Eowyn Ivey

Some people hear the voice of God in their dreams or through prayer or meditation. For me, God is truly in the details—the details found in the connections between the living things on the planet all working together to maintain the atmosphere and the soil.

Timothy Goodwin

In a way that I haven’t yet figured out how to fully articulate, I believe that children who get to see bald eagles, coyotes, deer, moose, grouse, and other similar sights each morning will have a certain kind of matrix or fabric or foundation of childhood, the nature and quality of which will be increasing rare and valuable as time goes on, and which will be cherished into adulthood, as well as becoming- and this is a leap of faith by me- a source of strength and knowledge to them somehow. That the daily witnessing of the natural wonders is a kind of education of logic and assurance that cannot be duplicated by any other means, or in other place: unique and significant, and, by God, still somehow relevant, even now, in the twenty-first century. For as long as possible, I want my girls to keep believing that beauty, though not quite commonplace and never to pass unobserved or unappreciated, is nonetheless easily witnessed on any day, in any given moment, around any forthcoming bend. And that the wild world has a lovely order and pattern and logic, even in the shouting, disorderly chaos of breaking-apart May and reassembling May. That if there can be a logic an order even in May, then there can be in all seasons and all things.

Rick Bass

We walk alone in the wilderness.

Lailah Gifty Akita

The moment her hymen was plucked from her body in the wilderness, Her soul was taken from sanity.

Roman Payne

The mountains knew the definition of freedom. They provided a place where he could find his mind.

Daniel J. Rice

At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature.

Wilkie Collins

Their minds told them this life was not their own. This life was not the one designed for this body and soul. The truth of existence was a happiness separated from the easy happy life. There was music in the forest. There was clean air where nobody could hear him breathe.

Daniel J. Rice

Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind,” she said with a hintof sadness.“You lost your mind a long time ago,” he said seriously. She looked at him with indignation. “That’s a compliment for anyone who knows the freedom and clarity of losing their mind,” he reaffirmed her.

Daniel J. Rice

...returning to nature has been a dream present in the minds of every generation since mankind first left nature.

Daniel J. Rice

You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind.You shout the word—mind, mind, mind—over and over and then you laugh, saying as I live and breathe, a slave by choice.

Toni Morrison

We rely only on God in the wilderness.

Lailah Gifty Akita

God determine the time and duration in the wilderness for every man.

Lailah Gifty Akita

The wilderness is a place for spiritual rebirth.

Lailah Gifty Akita

In the wilderness, God performs His mighty miracles.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Champions are made in the dark before they are revealed in light.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The farther you venture into the forest the more valuable the fruit.

Matshona Dhliwayo

If a flower can flourish in the desert, you can flourish anywhere.

Matshona Dhliwayo

On the path to greatness, life teaches you to walk with stones in your shoes.

Matshona Dhliwayo

If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.

Vera Nazarian

The trees were friendly, they gave me rest and shadowed refuge. Slipping through them, I felt safe and competent. My whole body was occupied. I had little energy to think or worry.

Aspen Matis

But I weren't no quitter No wolf nor bear just gives up when they get beat or hungry. You ever seen a bear jump off a cliff 'cause life handed him a few rough draws? No, you haven't. The wild keeps going till it don't have strength in its muscles and bones. The wild doesn't give up; it's forever, and so was I.

Beth Lewis

Speechless is not even a good enough word to describe what I feel when I see the pictures of how we have transformed the world from the good to bad, from natural to artificial, physical appearance to daily makeup. I think I want to go with the word ENRAGED, DISGUSTED, or better yet INSULTED .

Auliq-Ice

How great are the advantages of solitude! -- How sublime is the silence of nature's ever-active energies? There is something in the very name of wilderness, which charms the ear, and soothes the spirit of man. There is religion in it.

Estwick Evans

...there is something which impresses the mind with awe in the shade and silence of these vast forests. In the deep solitude, alone with nature, we converse with God.

Thaddeus Mason Harris

Nature has wrought with a bolder hand in America.

Nathaniel Parker Willis

...is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?

Henry David Thoreau

What are the temples which Roman robbers have reared, - what are the towers in which feudal oppression has fortified itself...to the deep forests which the eye of God has alone pervaded, and where Nature, in her unviolated sanctuary, has for ages laid her fruits and flowers on His altar! What is the echo of roofs...or or aisles that pealed the anthems of painted pomp, to the silence that has reigned in these dim groves since the first fiat of Creation was spoken.

Charles Fenno Hoffman

When I was a child in Scotland, I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I've been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures. Fortunately, around my native town of Dunbar, by the stormy North Sea, there was no lack of wildness...

John Muir

It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature...scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the same of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere support of a larger, but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary...

John Stuart Mills

Don’t forget that the land is always out there, making its way, doing everything it can so you can breathe fresh air; so you can eat fresh food; so you can move and see and feel and think, and it’s on your side. The world is out there doing what it’s been doing way before you came here, it’s firm and strong and it takes a lot to bring it down.so from time to time, just go outside and look at this spectacle. This pure painting right in front of your eyes. No one created it. No one owns it. It doesn’t want anything. It doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone. It simply is. So maybe, try a little tenderness. Just give it a chance to do what it can do. Just let it help you breatheand eatand moveand seeand maybe just try to live your life in a way that doesn’t kill this force of naturethat is just trying to give you a world worth living in. A clean world. A fresh world. Paths, forests, oceans, animals, oxygen, water. That’s all it takes.Just try a little tenderness towards this world we’ve been lucky enough to build our homes on. If you take care of it, it will take care of you.

Charlotte Eriksson

There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons, And I want to go back—and I will.

Robert Service

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is in the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigour of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess of Concord, i.e. than I import into it.

Henry David Thoreau

The dusk rapidly deepened; the glades grew dark; the crackling of the fire and the wash of little waves along the rocky lake shore were the only sounds audible. The wind had dropped with the sun, and in all that vast world of branches nothing stirred. Any moment, it seemed, the woodland gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, might stretch their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees.

Algernon Blackwood

If you have to ask that question, you wouldn't understand the answer.

John McPhee

If there is something that I have learned from my time on this planet of ours, something that I can share and that I know to be true, it’s that we disconnect ourselves from nature and the wilderness too many times. Our birthplace. Our home.

Jellis Vaes

The writer Richard Manning has argued that 'the most destructive force in the American West is its commanding views, because they foster the illusion that we command.

Phillip Connors

This is not wilderness for designation or for a park. Not a scenic wilderness and not one good for fishing or the viewing of wildlife. It is wilderness that gets into your nostrils, that runs with your sweat. It is the core of everything living, wilderness like molten iron.

Craig Childs

Our incredible bewilderment (wilderness separation) blinds us from seeing that our many personal and global problems primarily result from our assault of and separation from the natural creation process within and around us. Our estrangement from nature leaves us wanting,and when we want there is never enough. Our insatiable wanting is called greed. It is a major source of our destructive dependencies and violence.

Michael J. Cohen

Since well before the Kung's engine noise first penetrated the forest, a conversation of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is not a language like Russian or Chinese but it is a language nonetheless, and it is older than the forest. The crows speak it; the dog speaks it; the tiger speaks it, and so do the men--some more fluently than others.

John Vaillant

Unlike the majority of people, he did not hate or fear the wilderness; as harsh as the empty lands were, they possessed a grace and a beauty that no artifice could compete with and that he found restorative.

Christopher Paolini

Nothing truly wild is unclean.

John Muir

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Wilderness Quotes - Page 2

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