100 Quotes About Wilderness

Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art–a euphemism–tamed wilderness. Dejan Stojanovic

To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love him. Frederick Buechner

Ô, Wanderess, WanderessWhen did you feel your most euphoric kiss? Was I the source of your greatest bliss? Roman Payne

The wilderness leads to wonder of the moment. Lailah Gifty Akita

Ô, Muse of the Heart’s Passion, let me relive my Love’s memory, to remember her body, so brave and so free, and the sound of my Dreameress singing to me, and the scent of my Dreameress sleeping by me, Ô, sing, sweet Muse, my soliloquy! Roman Payne

Some of the most memorable, and least regrettable, nights of my own youth were spent in coon hunting with farmers. There is no denying that these activities contributed to the economy of farm households, but a further fact is that they were pleasures; they were wilderness pleasures, not greatly different from the pleasures pursued by conservationists and wilderness lovers. As I was always aware, my friends the coon hunters were not motivated just by the wish to tree coons and listen to hounds and listen to each other, all of which were sufficiently attractive; they were coon hunters also because they wanted to be afoot in the woods at night. Most of the farmers I have known, and certainly the most interesting ones, have had the capacity to ramble about outdoors for the mere happiness of it, alert to the doings of the creatures, amused by the sight of a fox catching grasshoppers, or by the puzzle of wild tracks in the snow. . Wendell Berry

...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. Rebecca Solnit

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. Henryk Sienkiewicz

Much of human behavior can be explained by watching the wild beasts around us. They are constantly teaching us things about ourselves and the way of the universe, but most people are too blind to watch and listen. Suzy Kassem

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. Marybeth Lorbiecki

When D's cabin caught fire, D was out of the country. Half the town- Christians and drinkers alike-came out to fight the fire and loot the cabin. There were individual piles of loot, and fights over the piles. "That's my pile." "The hell it is, it's mine. John McPhee

Amid the stillness of the night, in the depths of the ravine, from the direction in which the corpses lay suddenly resounded a kind of inhuman, frightful laughter in which quivered despair, and joy, and cruelty, and suffering, and pain, and sobbing, and derision; the heart-rending and spasmodic laughter of the insane or condemned. Henryk Sienkiewicz

In the meantime the groans changed into the protracted, thunderous roar by which all living creatures are struck with terror, and the nerves of people, who do not know what fear is, shake, just as the window-panes rattle from distant cannonading. Henryk Sienkiewicz

A thousand times, people may have touched each other, but never ever sensed a single vein of oneness or complicity in the wilderness of their inner world, since obdurate mental impediments have been barricading the road to understanding and propinquity. (“A thousand times”) Erik Pevernagie

The old school of thought would have you believe that you'd be a fool to take on nature without arming yourself with every conceivable measure of safety and comfort under the sun. But that isn't what being in nature is all about. Rather, it's about feeling free, unbounded, shedding the distractions and barriers of our civilization–not bringing them with us. Ryel Kestenbaum

When you’re in the wild, there’s nothing to hide behind. No bars or credit cards or movie theatres or cell phones or credentials or security. You’re just alone with yourself. You look around and lose yourself in the mountains, rivers, forests or tundra, but you can see nothing except for the chaos in your own mind. It is fucking terrifying and peaceful at the same time. Shannon Mullen

Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other--outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit. Unknown

The question haunted me, and the real answer came, as answers often do, not in the canyon but at an unlikely time and in an unexpected place, flying over the canyon at thirty thousand feet on my way to be a grandmother. My mind on other things, intending only to glance out, the exquisite smallness and delicacy of the river took me completely by surprise. In the hazy light of early morning, the canyon lay shrouded, the river flecked with glints of silver, reduced to a thin line of memory, blurred by a sudden realization that clouded my vision. The astonishing sense of connection with that river and canyon caught me completely unaware, and in a breath I understood the intense, protective loyalty so many people feel for the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. It has to do with truth and beauty and love of this earth, the artifacts of a lifetime and the descant of a canyon wren at dawn. Ann Zwinger

Every sacred soul must walk and keep the way of God in the wilderness for years, to begin the sacred writings. Lailah Gifty Akita

The wilderness is a test, whether we will walk in the ways of God. Lailah Gifty Akita

The marketplace is an institution that teaches self-advancement, private acquisition, and the domination of nature. Its way of thinking is incompatible with the round river. Ecological harmony is a nonmarket value that takes a collective will to achieve. Donald Worster

What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another. Chris Maser

I'd read the section in my guidebook about the trail's history the winter before, but it wasn't until now–a couple of miles out of Burney Falls, as I walked in my flimsy sandals in the early evening heat–that the realization of what that story meant picked up force and hit me squarely in the chest: preposterous as it was, when Catherine Montgomery and Clinton Clarke and Warren Rogers and the hundreds of others who'd created the PCT had imagined the people who would walk that high trail that wound down the heights of our western mountains, they'd been imagining me. It didn't matter that everything from my cheap knockoff sandals to my high-tech-by-1995-standards boots and backpack would have been foreign to them, because what mattered was utterly timeless. It was the thing that compelled them to fight for the trail against all the odds, and it was the thing that drove me and every other long-distance hiker onward on the most miserable days. It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. That's what Montgomery knew, I supposed. And what Clarke knew and Rogers and what thousands of people who preceded and followed them knew. It was what I knew before I even really did, before I could have known how truly hard and glorious the PCT would be, how profoundly the trail would both shatter and shelter me. . Cheryl Strayed

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

I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness. Aldo Leopold

We need the tonic of wildness... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. Henry David Thoreau

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity John Muir

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. Wallace Stegner

Wildness is the preservation of the World. Henry David Thoreau

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries. Jimmy Carter

There is a love of wild nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties John Muir

Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map? Aldo Leopold

To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part. Aldo Leopold

Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and survival on many other forms of life, so he is careful to take their interests into account in whatever he does. He is in fact a wilderness advocate of a certain kind. It is when he respects and nurtures the wilderness of his soil and his plants that his garden seems to flourish most. Wildness, he has found, resides not only out there, but right here: in his soil, in his plants, even in himself.. But wildness is more a quality than a place, and though humans can't manufacture it, they can nourish and husband it.. The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery. Michael Pollan

I’d forgotten how enlivening it could feel, seeing clearly and far. Aridity frees light. It also unleashes grandeur. The earth here wasn’t cloaked in forest, nor draped in green. Green was pastoral, peaceful, mild. Desert beauty was “sublime” in the way that the romantic poets had used the word- not peaceful dales but rugged mountain faces, not reassuring but daunting nature, the earth’s skin and haunches, its spines and angles arching prehistorically in sunlight. Julene Bair

I had some terrific experiences in the wilderness since I wrote you last - overpowering, overwhelming, " he gushed to his friend Cornel Tengel. "But since then I am always being overwhelmed. I require it to sustain life. Everett Ruess Jon Krakauer

... there's a silent voice in the wilderness that we hear only when no one else is around. When you go far, far beyond, out across the netherlands of the Known, the din of human static slowly fades away, over and out. Rob Schultheis

If we are to have a culture as resilient and competent in the face of necessity as it needs to be, then it must somehow involve within itself a ceremonious generosity toward the wilderness of natural force and instinct. The farm must yield a place to the forest, not as a wood lot, or even as a necessary agricultural principle but as a sacred grove - a place where the Creation is let alone, to serve as instruction, example, refuge; a place for people to go, free of work and presumption, to let themselves alone. (pg. 125, The Body and the Earth). Wendell Berry

In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens -- a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree -- the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence -- antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment. Michael Pollan

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

Raindrops blossom brilliantly in the rainbow, and change to flowers in the sod, but snow comes in full flower direct from the dark, frozen sky. John Muir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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

...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

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

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 . AuliqIce

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

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

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

In the wilderness, God performs His mighty miracles. 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

We rely only on God in the wilderness. Lailah Gifty Akita

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

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

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

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

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

We walk alone in the wilderness. Lailah Gifty Akita

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