Best 284 quotes in «wilderness quotes» category

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.

I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.

As one who has often felt this need, and who has found refreshment in wild places, I attest to the recreational value of wilderness.

... chastity is not given once and for all like a wedding ring that is put on never to be taken off, but is a garden which each day must be weeded, watered, and trimmed anew, or soon there will be only brambles and wilderness.

For the Lakota there was no wilderness. Nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly.

In God's wildness lies the hope of the world.

I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.

If we are willing to be still and open enough to listen, wilderness itself will teach us.

I'm 40 next year and I'm very well aware that where I am now, it becomes a bit of a wilderness for actresses.

I named this place Listening Point because only when one comes to listen, only when one is aware and still, can things be seen and heard.  Everyone has a listening point somewhere.  It does not have to be in the north or close to the wilderness, but someplace of quiet where the universe can be contemplated with awe.

Madam Speaker, I have spent more than half my life as a member of the Resources Committee. In that time I have supported numerous wilderness designations. In fact, I cannot recall ever opposing a wilderness bill.

It always seems to me odd to call a place a wilderness when every wilderness area in the US bristles with rules and regulations as to how you can behave, what you're allowed to do, and is patrolled by armed rangers enforcing the small print. They're parks, of course, not wildernesses at all.

It can be frightening to spend 5 weeks alone in a cabin in the wilderness. I was able to collect my thoughts and worked a lot - because I couldn't do anything else.

It is like living in a wilderness of mirrors. No fact goes unchallenged.

Simply put, I believe we should not seek the lowest common denominator when it comes to wilderness and saddle a wilderness designation with exceptions, exclusions, and exemptions.

Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander.

No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.

No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty.

Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation's character and health than they will to its pocketbook, and to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us.

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it.

One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever.

Only to the white man was nature a 'wilderness'.

The most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants.

Solitude is an essential quality of wilderness.

The world is so tremendously spectacular that every visual, sense, and sparked connection swells my unrestrained passion for life. I find I feel this the most when I am immersed in nature and sliding into the bloodstream of the wilderness.

The supreme reality of our time is the vulnerability of our planet.

There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature.

The wilderness provides an environment for a child's inner life to develop because it requires him to be constantly aware of his surroundings.

We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.

Type 1 Error: When we settle into wilderness, we are in conflict with so many life forms that we have to destroy them to exist. Keep out of the bush. It is already in good order.

Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.

When capitalists are thwarted, deflected, or dispossessed, the generals and politicians,... and socialist intellectuals, are always amazed at how quickly the great physical means of production - the contested tokens of wealth and resources of nature - dissolve into so much scrap, ruined concrete, snarled wire, and wilderness.

What a glorious time they must have in that wilderness, far from mankind and election day!

What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself.

Wilderness without wildlife is just scenery.

Without friends the world is but a wilderness.

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.

Without wilderness, the world's a cage.

Without wilderness, we will eventually lose the capacity to understand America. Our drive, our ruggedness, our unquenchable optimism and zeal and elan go back to the challenges of the untrammeled wilderness.

A body 'as to move gentle an' speak low when wild things is about.

Acceptance does not mean surrender. It does not mean resignation. Acceptance means I am finally available to the entire spectrum of creative responses.

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

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

A drove of mules the size of ants appeared in silhouette on a ridgetop path, moving at a star's pace. The mules were driven by human intelligence and commercial interests, expertise in breeding and bloodlines. Everything was human; the farthest wilderness was steeped with sociability.

A flower's structure leads a bee toward having pollen adhere to its body . . . we don't know of any such reason why beautiful places attract humans.

Alone in the silence, I understand for a moment the dread which many feel in the presence of primeval desert, the unconscious fear which compels them to tame, alter or destroy what they cannot understand, to reduce the wild and prehuman to human dimensions. Anything rather than confront directly the antehuman, that other world which frightens not through danger or hostility but in something far worse - its implacable indifference.

A loon called from across the lake in the hushed stillness of the rising moon.

And I realize my own culpability here--I don't want to spend the time and energy figuring how to solve my own rodent problems, so instead I nuke them. The irony is that, ostensibly, I have to come to this remote homestead to learn about Nature, with a capital N. To meditate on wilderness, on wildness. Only instead of apprenticing myself to the most basic concerns of such a life. . . I'm cheating myself of any real learning by opting for short-term solutions to long-term problems. It's a poisoning of the mind and the imagination, and what hemorrhages is a sense of responsibility to anything beyond my own comfort. But I do it, time and again. When the bait is gone, I put out another.

And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul