Best 284 quotes in «wilderness quotes» category

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.

Where wilderness can still be found, the ancientness of the land and the nobility of man's struggle emerge. Wilderness is vastly different from the clutter and clatter of much of our civilized world. In wilderness one experiences exhilaration and joy. In freedom and simplicity, in its vitality and immense variety, happiness may not only be pursued; it is ofttimes found.

Wilderness, or wildness is a mystique. A religion, an intense philosophy, a dream of ideal society - these are also mystique. We are not engaged in preserving so many acre-feet of water, so many board-feet of timber, so many billion tons of granite, so many profit possibilities in so many ways for those concerned with the material aspects of the world. Yet, we must accept the fact that human life (at least in the metabolic sense) depends upon the resources of the Earth. As the fisherman depends upon the rivers, lakes and seas, and the farmer upon the land for his existence, so does mankind in general depend upon the beauty of the world about him for his spiritual and emotional existence. From a speech to The Wilderness Society, May 9 1980

Wilderness to the people pf America is a spiritual necessity, an antidote to the high pressure of modern life, a means of regaining serenity and equilibrium.

Wild beach is my primordial address.

Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing. I suppose some will wish to debate whether it is important to keep these primitive arts alive. I shall not debate it. Either you know it in your bones, or you are very, very old.

...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.

Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting So much as just finding the gold. It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder, It's the forests where silence has lease; It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It's the stillness that fills me with peace.

Wilderness begins with disconnections. It continues with deceit

Wilderness holds an original presence giving expression to that which we lack, the losses we long to recover, the absences we seek to fill. Wilderness revives the memory of unity. Through its protection we can find faith in our humanity.

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.

You can feel the anarchy and wilderness through words, and the peace and heavens as well.

You Cannot Escape Beauty And You Cannot Stop Being Attracted To It, Because Beauty Allures. Beauty Seduces. Beauty Wants You To Come Closer.

You can stretch to your fullest in this land, Emma, and not touch any edges. There's no dream too big for the wilderness. I'd hate to see it tamed and carved up into little fiefdoms.

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

Wilds whisper, yet I long for their roar.

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

... 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Solitude is an essential quality of wilderness.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Wilderness without wildlife is just scenery.

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