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.
Alan Alda
(1936 - )
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.
“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.
Best friend, my wellspring in the wilderness!
There is no short-cut no patent tram-road, to wisdom. After all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must still be trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.
This country has achieved its commercial and financial supremacy under a regime of private ownership. It conquered the wilderness, built our railroads, our factories, our public utilities, gave us the telegraph, the telephone, the electric light, the automobile, the airplane, the radio and a higher standard of living for all the people than obtains anywhere else in the world. No great invention ever came from a government-owned industry.
Brigham Young lived to become immortal in history as an American Moses by leading his people through the wilderness into an unpromised land.
EDEN We had no childhood, Eve and I. Eden was our mother's breast. Our lullaby was earth's first whimperings as grass and herb bloomed seasonless. I named them blade, by stem, by stalk in loneliness, before the Gods formed woman from my rib of dust. The garden was our womb: to nurture flesh, acknowledge bone, mold our souls in clay. We found our eyes, we heard our mouths, we filled each nostril full of sky, fingers tasted water, hands touched naked skin, bare as the fish in the four rivers, smooth as the serpent, who walked on subtle feet beneath the one tree, given and forbidden. We were pretenders, Eve and I, beneath its leaves of black and white. We played at being Gods below its fruit-filled limbs, imagined our posterity, and in the shade of its dark promise, we dreamed of immortality. Eden was our childhood, lived before the wilderness, before the curse, before Cherubim. And the Gods knew it was a garden like everyman's filled with only one choice.
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread - and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness - Oh, Wilderness were Paradise now!
The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see. . . . No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, as vital to our lives as water and good bread.
Men and women, inspired by faith in man's dignity, goaded by conviction in man's responsibility, labored that this land might be a better home for those who followed them. Because every American generation attacked its problems with fresh vigor, we have peopled a continent, subdued its prairies and wilderness, tamed its rivers and devoted its resources to the betterment of those who dwell in it.
There is central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.