Best 284 quotes in «wilderness quotes» category

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

I do not find myself beguiled, let alone enchanted by mortal man or woman with their pretense, show or adornments, yet when I’m alone in the pine-scented cloak of forested mountains, I’m both. It was nearing sunset in the treasure state with not another soul in sight and despite my own plainness and insignificance, I never felt more grounded or at peace; it’s a tranquility only the curvaceous, imposing landscape of the frontier can provide and I was free of the trepidation within my thoughts as I gratefully and prayerfully walked with God. All was well within me and around me for that blissful yet brief moment in time.

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.

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

If people start paying attention to the organisms that are thriving, unseen, among us, I think it will change us for the better: On the political scale, we'll become more realistic and effective in our efforts to protect the environment; on the personal scale, we'll be happier and more full of wonder.

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.

If you have ever wanted to visit somewhere completely wild – away from services, roads, people, and all signs of humanity – head to Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, one of Earth's last true wilderness places.

I love to escape to wild places – forests, mountains rivers or the sea. If that’s not possible, I flee into books; vicarious travel is rejuvenating

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

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.

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

I have seen the light in the wilderness and I must follow it.

I— I am no’ deservin’ of such kindness. I am tainted, do you no’ see that?” “All I see, Bethie, is the woman I—” Love. “— care deeply about and wish to protect.” The word had come to him so naturally, had slipped onto his tongue as if he’d meant it. And to his astonishment, Nicholas realized he did. He loved her. He was in love with Bethie Stewart.

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.

I'm quite happy being male. The notion of being female scares me to death." "Why?" "I'd have to put up with men.

In the dry places, men begin to dream, wrote Wright Morris, who grew up north of here, in Nebraska. Where rivers run sand, something in man begins to flow. I thought I knew exactly what he meant. The sandy beds of dry creeks unfurl evocatively into the beckoning distance, inscribing their faint script over the land. They entice the exploring spirit.

In our noisy cities we tend to forget the things our ancestors knew on a gut level: that the wilderness is alive, that its whispers are there for all to hear - and to respond to.

In our forests part divine and makes her heart palpitate wild and tame are one. What a delicious Sound!

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

In the wilderness, we experience the faithfulness of God.

In the wilderness, we can only wonder.

In the wild there is an element that cannot be seen, tasted, heard or smelt – it can only be felt, and it is a feeling of enchantment.

In the wilderness, God performs His mighty miracles.

In the wilderness, I found solace in writing.

In the wilderness, we must learn to walk with the Creator.

In the wilderness you learn how to overcome your greatest enemy: yourself.

Inversnaid This darksome burn, horseback brown, His rollrock highroad roaring down, In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam Flutes and low to the lake falls home. A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth Turns and twindles over the broth Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning, It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning. Degged with dew, dappled with dew Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern, And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn. What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

In trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects as well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high-risk activities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly charged bond that exists between fathers and sons. The result of this meandering inquiry is the book now before you.

I prefer to be wrong to save the wildness of the right.

I own a crevice stuffed with moss and a couch of lemming fur; I sit and listen to the music of water dripping on a distant stone. Or I sing to myself of stealth and loneliness No one comes to see me but I hear outside the scratching of claws, the warm, inquisitive breath … (from 'The Hermitage')

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.

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

I think it is far more important to save one square mile of wilderness, anywhere, by any means, than to produce another book on the subject.

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.

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

...it is disquieting to feel that the conversion into a National Forest or Park always means the esthetic death of a piece of wild country.

It is impossible to provide unlimited visitation and the essential qualities of an unconventional, non-urban experience simultaneously. Here too a compromise is called for: a willingness to trade quantity for quality of experience. There is nothing undemocratic or even unusual in such a trade. The notion that commitment to democratic principles compels the assumption of scarcity is one of the familiar misconceptions of our time. We need a willingness to value a certain kind of experience highly enough that we are prepared to have fewer opportunists for access in exchange for a different sort of experience when we do get access.

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.

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...

It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger.

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.

It truly is an odd thing we bikers do, riding through miserable conditions like this. We don’t invite them or look for them, surely, but when they are upon us we relish the challenge and silently claim the superiority of adventure over comfort, wilderness over warmth, discovery over certainty.

It truly is an odd thing we bikers do, riding through miserable conditions like this. We don’t invite then or look for them, surely, but when they are upon us we relish the challenge and silently claim the superiority of adventure over comfort, wilderness over warmth, discovery over certainty.

I used to be a wanderess without roots – discontent and bereft of belonging and then he took me to The Last Best Place where I was touched and warmed through. Never before have I felt the breath-taking spirit of the frontier as distinctly as I do here and never before have I felt so at home where all things magnificent are made more so by inspired calm of earthy humility.

It is there from the moment I smell the tussock, the forest, the heat of the sun on rocks. And it's there in the smell of blood, sweat and mud ingrained in my jersey as I fall asleep using it as a pillow in a mountain hut, under a heaven studded with glittering stars.

It looks a bit like the inside of a cave that has been turned inside out and warmed by the sun.

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

I’ve lost my wild heart once. Twice. Too many times to count. I’ve lost her most often when I’ve forgotten myself, when I’ve denied my own truths, when I’ve pushed down the need to create for so long that my heart...she finds better things to do. The funny thing is, that the losing and the finding are interwoven. We must lose our wild hearts from time to time, I believe. We must so that we know why we need them. We must so that we remember that in order to be found we must go into the wilderness. Sometimes, it is only in the getting lost that we can find our way back home.

I wish my whispers are heard and requited as a storm... Because, the storm is that keeps me alive!

I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn’t resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink (…) That was a very different thing from wanting to die.