Best 284 quotes in «wilderness quotes» category

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.

Looking out the window of a large women's monastery after Divine Liturgy, my friend saw a few nuns walking toward the woods with satchels on their backs. Inquiring who they were, she was told they were ascetics who lived in the wilderness and had come to the monastery to attend Liturgy and to receive some food. Although we are much weaker in our times and far less ascetical than the early desert fathers and mothers, let it never be said that extreme Christian asceticism is extinct. Who knows how many St. Mary of Egypts are hidden in the wilderness?

Maar zolang ze er nog is, zullen in de winternachten de wolvenbenden de wildernis luid huilend blijven doorkruisen. Ze waren er reeds vanaf het begin van de wereld. En ondanks het feit, dat de mensheid de wolven van het begin af haatte en onafgebroken beoorloogde en dat in de verder nog komende eeuwen steeds zal blijven doen, zullen ze tot aan de dag van het laatste oordeel de wereld blijven bevolken. De reden hiervan is, dat ze het symbool der wildernis zelf zijn en het denkbeeld, dat de wildernis zou blijven voortgaan te bestaan, maar zonder wolven, is nog vreemder dan zich een natie zonder vlag te denken.

Many workers in the petrochemical plants were conservative Republicans and avid hunters and fishers and felt caught in a terrible bind. They loved their magnificent wilderness. They remembered it as children. They knew it and respect it as sportsmen. But their jobs were in industries that polluted--often legally--this same wilderness.

Mountain’s realization comes through the details of the breath, mountain appears in each step. Mountain then lives inside our bones, inside our heart-drum. It stands like a huge mother in the atmosphere of our minds. Mountain draws ancestors together in the form of clouds. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the raining of the past. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the winds of the future. Mountain mother is a birth gate that joins the above and below, she is a prayer house, she is a mountain. Mountain is a mountain.

Mountains have long been a geography for pilgrimage, place where people have been humbled and strengthened, they are symbols of the sacred center. Many have traveled to them in order to find the concentrated energy of Earth and to realize the strength of unimpeded space. Viewing a mountain at a distance or walking around its body we can see its shape, know its profile, survey its surrounds. The closer you come to the mountain the more it disappears, the mountain begins to lose its shape as you near it, its body begins to spread out over the landscape losing itself to itself. On climbing the mountain the mountain continues to vanish. It vanishes in the detail of each step, its crown is buried in space, its body is buried in the breath. On reaching the mountain summit we can ask, “What has been attained?” - The top of the mountain? Big view? But the mountain has already disappeared. Going down the mountain we can ask, “What has been attained?” Going down the mountain the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain disappears, the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain is realized. Mountain’s realization comes through the details of the breath, mountain appears in each step. Mountain then lives inside our bones, inside our heart-drum. It stands like a huge mother in the atmosphere of our minds. Mountain draws ancestors together in the form of clouds. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the raining of the past. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the winds of the future. Mountain mother is a birth gate that joins the above and below, she is a prayer house, she is a mountain. Mountain is a mountain.

Most of what she knew, she'd learned from the wild. Nature had nurtured, tutored, and protected her when no one else would.

Muscles relax, the mind expands. The vastness enters into the skin like a shot. ‘Our’ time dissolves.

My spiritual life is found inside the heart of the wild.

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

My verse, my blood.

Nature, in her untamed state, is savage and unrelenting.

Nature has wrought with a bolder hand in America.

Naysayers at their polite best chided the rewilders for romanticizing the past; at their sniping worst, for tempting a 'Jurassic Park' disaster. To these the rewilders quietly voiced a sad and stinging reply. The most dangerous experiment is already underway. The future most to be feared is the one now dictated by the status quo. In vanquishing our most fearsome beasts from the modern world, we have released worse monsters from the compound. They come in disarmingly meek and insidious forms, in chewing plagues of hoofed beasts and sweeping hordes of rats and cats and second-order predators. They come in the form of denuded seascapes and barren forests, ruled by jellyfish and urchins, killer deer and sociopathic monkeys. They come as haunting demons of the human mind. In conquering the fearsome beasts, the conquerors had unwittingly orphaned themselves.

My grandfather ran off the V-2 rocket film a dozen times and then hoped that someday our cities would open up more and let the green and the land and the wilderness in more, to remind people that we're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big. When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, someday it will come in and get us for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be. You see?

Nothing dollarable is safe.

Nothing truly wild is unclean.

Now, wilderness can be seen as a useful fiction, a fiction constructed by John Muir and his heirs and deployed to keep places from being destroyed by resource extraction and wholesale development.

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.

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

Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art—a euphemism—tamed wilderness.

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

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!

Only she who attempts the absurd can ever achieve the impossible.

On the bus was an old lady from Boston, and when she learned what I was going to do, she was horrified and indignant about me going out into that awful wilderness alone....I tried to explain to her that I would be far more afraid to wander around Boston or New York alone than to hike over Trail Ridge.

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

Onward and upward he pushed until rock, ground, and forest came to an end, until there was nothing but a sharp edge of blunt earth protruding in the late light of the range, where he could see well beyond the park boundaries to national forest land that he had once scouted on foot and horseback. He remembered it then as roadless, the only trails being those hacked by Indians and prospectors. He had taken notes on the flora and fauna, commented on the age of the bristlecone pine trees at the highest elevations, the scrub oak in the valleys, the condors overhead, the trout in alpine tarns. He had lassoed that wild land in ink, returned to Washington, and sent the sketch to the president, who preserved it for posterity. What did Michelangelo feel at the end of his life, staring at a ceiling in the Vatican or a marble figure in Florence? Pinchot knew. And those who followed him, his great-great-grandchildren, Teddy's great-great-grandchildren, people living in a nation one day of five hundred million people, could find their niche as well. Pinchot felt God in his soul, and thanked him, and weariness in his bones. He sensed he had come full circle.

Our canoe raced toward the rock.

Our lips were for each other and our eyes were full of dreams. We knew nothing of travel and we knew nothing of loss. Ours was a world of eternal spring, until the summer came.

Out here, everything was open, and the weather was the fabric of the world.

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

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

Penises, toe knuckles, bellybuttons, vaginas. Sam felt the expansiveness of his own desires as he sensed, stretching away on all sides of him, an endless forest of jutting elbows, erect penises, stiff nostril hairs, clitoral flaps, quivering eyelids, testicles round as ice cream scoops, and pert feisty nipples – a wonderful wilderness he could get lost in and explore for the rest of his life.

People don’t want you to fix them, they just want you to let them evolve into a beautiful wilderness of contradictions.

Priceless diamonds often shape in worthless dirt.

Quando, dalle prigioni delle nostre città, volgiamo lo sguardo alla wilderness, quando il nostro intelletto sperimenta il privilegio di condurre una vita scevra da convenzioni insensate o senza colpe né sotterfugi, in breve, una vita integra, credo che possiamo rivolgerci al lupo. In esso percepiamo il coraggio, la resistenza e un modo di vivere franco e leale; percepiamo che è in armonia con l’universo mentre noi non lo siamo ancora.

Quando vi trovate in un bosco circondato da montagne maestose, potete posare la mano sul terreno e sentire il palpito della natura. Potete svegliarvi per mille mattine e, spalancato l'uscio della baracca, bearvi gli occhi e l'anima con uno spettacolo d'incomparabile bellezza. E passeranno gli anni, la vista vi si farà debole, ma quello spettacolo resterà sempre chiaro perché il ricordo non ha bisogno d'occhiali.

Quoting Viola Davis (who is sharing rules she lives by): '4. I will not be a mystery to my daughter. She will know me and I will share my stories with her—the stories of failure, shame, and accomplishment. She will know she’s not alone in that wilderness.

...she had the top down and I could smell everything in those woods, and you know what an old fine smell that is, like something which has been mostly left alone and is not much troubled. ("Mrs. Todd's Shortcut")

Simpson, the student of divinity, it was who arranged his conclusions probably with the best, though not most scientific, appearance of order. Out there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely witnessed something crudely and essentially primitive. Something that had survived somehow the advance of humanity had emerged terrifically, betraying a scale of life monstrous and immature. He envisaged it rather as a glimpse into prehistoric ages, when superstitions, gigantic and uncouth, still oppressed the hearts of men: when the forces of nature were still untamed, the Powers that may have haunted a primeval universe not yet withdrawn. To this day he thinks of what he termed years later in a sermon 'savage and formidable Potencies lurking behind the souls of men, not evil perhaps in themselves, yet instinctively hostile to humanity as it exists.' ("The Wendigo")

She was right. The purebred girls were making mistakes on purpose, in order to give us an advantage. 'King me,' I growled, out of turn. 'I say king me!' and Felicity meekly complied. Beulah pretended not to mind when we got frustrated with the oblique, fussy movement from square to square and shredded the board to ribbons. I felt sorry for them. I wondered what it would be like to be bred in captivity, and always homesick for a dimly sensed forest, the trees you've never seen.

So abundant and novel are the objects of interest in a pure wilderness that unless you are pursuing special studies it matters little where you go, or how often to the same place. Wherever you chance to be always seems at the moment of all places the best; and you feel that there can be no happiness in this world or in any other for those who may not be happy here.

Some of us are drawn to mountains the way the moon draws the tide. Both the great forests and the mountains live in my bones. They have taught me, humbled me, purified me and changed me.

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.

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

The American woods have been unnerving people for 300 years. The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a vist to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the cored. This wasn't the tame world of overgrown orchards and sun-dappled paths that passed for wilderness in suburban Concord, Massachusetts, but a forbiggind, oppressive, primeval country that was "grim and wild . . .savage and dreary," fit only for "men nearer of kin to the rocks and wild animals than we." The experience left him, in the words of one biographer, "near hysterical.

The beauty of Africa is not man made, it is natures gift to humanity.

… the countryside and the village are symbols of stability and security, of order. Yet they are also, as I have noted, liminal spaces, at a very narrow remove from the atavistic Wild. Arcadia is not the realm even of Giorgione and of Claude, with its cracked pillars and thunderbolts, its lurking banditti; still less is it Poussin’s sun-dappled and regularised realm of order, where, although the lamb may be destined for the altar and the spit, all things proceed with charm and gravity and studied gesture; least of all is it the degenerate and prettified Arcady of Fragonard and Watteau, filled with simpering courtier-Corydons, pallid Olympians, and fat-arsed putti. (It is only family piety that prevents me from taking a poker to an inherited coffee service in gilt porcelain with bastardised, deutero-Fragonard scenes painted on the sides of every damned thing. Cue Wallace Greenslade: ‘… “Round the Horne”, with Marie Antoinette as the dairymaid and Kenneth Williams as the manager of the camp-site….’) No: Arcadia is the very margin of the liminal space between the safe tilth and the threatening Wild, in which Pan lurks, shaggy and goatish, and Death proclaims, from ambush, et in Arcadia ego. Arcadia is not the Wide World nor the Riverbank, but the Wild Wood. And in that wood are worse than stoats and weasels, and the true Pan is no Francis of Assisi figure, sheltering infant otters. The Wild that borders and penetrates Arcady is red in tooth and claw.

The death of a real deer at my hands was just a vaporous, remote presence that hovered over the figure of the paper deer forty-five yards away at target six of our archery range, as I tried to hit the heart-lung section marked out in heavy black.

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.