Quotes about Wilderness

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in a way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains as to wilderness, as that which declares that the world was made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.

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

Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

Civilization no longer needs to open up wilderness; it needs wilderness to open up the still largely unexplored human mind.

Concrete is heavy; iron is hard - but the grass will prevail.

Why wilderness? Because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you beyond the next turning of the canyon walls.

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.

Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.

A world without open country would be universal jail.

“To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause within our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace.”

“It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honour nature's gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.”

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

There has been a calculated risk in every stage of American development--pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, businessmen who were not afraid of failure, and dreamers who were not afraid of action.

Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.

I am hearing the brightness of high bluffs and almond trees. I am tasting the wilderness of lakes, rivers and streams, caught in an angle of sound.

A HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW The surging sea of human life forever onward rolls, And bears to the eternal shore its daily freight of souls; Tbough bravely sails our bark today, pale Death sits at the prow, And few shall know we ever lived a hundred years from now. O mighty human brotherhood Why fiercely war and strive, While God's great world has ample space for everything alive? Broad fields uncultured and unclaimed are waiting for the plow Of progress that shall make them bloom a hundred years from now. Why should we try so earnestly in life's short, narrow span, On golden stairs to climb so high above our brother man? Why blindly at an earthly shrine in slavish homage bow? Our gold will rust, ourselves be dust, a hundred years from now. Why prize so much the world's applause? Why dread so much its blame? A fleeting echo is its voice of censure or of fame; The praise that thrills the heart, the scom that dyes with shame the brow, Will be as long-forgotten dreams a hundred years from now. O patient hearts, that meekly bear your weary load of wrongl O earnest hearts, that bravely dare, and striving, grow more strong! Press on till perfect peace is won; you'll never dream of how You struggled o'er life's thorny road a hundred years from now. Grand, lofty souls, who live and toil that freedom, right and truth Alone may rule the universe, for you is endless youth. When 'mid the blest with God you rest, the grateful land shall bow Above your clay in reverent love a hundred years from now. Earth's empires rise and fall. Time! like breakers on thy shore They rush upon thy rocks of doom, go down, and are no more. The starry wilderness of worlds that gem night's radiant brow Will light the skies for other eyes a hundred years from now. Our Father, to whose sleepless eye the past and future stand An open page, like babes we cling to Tby protecting hand; Change, sorrow, death, are naught to us, if we may safely bow Beneath the shadow of Thy throne a hundred years from now.

Women have no wilderness in them, They are provident instead, Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread.

Mastering the lawless science of our law,- That codeless myriad of precedent, That wilderness of single instances.

When God created Man, he gave him Music as a language different from all other languages. And early man sang his glory in the wilderness; and drew the hearts of kings and moved them from their thrones.

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

A wilderness of sweets.

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and, as he read, he wept, and trembled; and, not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, What shall I do?

Had they [the Tories] been in the wilderness they would have complained of the Ten Commandments. Remark.

In a rock garden we foster a little patch of the wilderness that stands to us for freedom.

One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.

Gardening is a long road, with many detours and way stations, and here we all are at one point or another. It's not a question of superior or inferior taste, merely a question of which detour we are on at the moment. Getting there (as they say) is not important; the wandering about in the wilderness or in the olive groves or in the bayous is the whole point.

The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.

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.