Wilderness Quotes - Page 26

• . . .nature is still predominant, and there are those who regret that with the improvements of cultivation the sublimity of the wilderness should pass away: for those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, affect the mind with a more deep toned emotion than aught which the hand of man has touched. Amid them the consequent associations are of God the creator-they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.

  Thomas Cole

  Nature, Regret, Men

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• What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest, with fewer open intervals or glades than you had imagined. Except the few burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Lakes, Land, Rivers

  Henry David Thoreau (1873). “The Maine Woods”, p.80

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• A society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization.

  Edward Abbey

  Nature, Civilization, Names

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• If Earth is considered a closed system, there will be less for all forever. The frontier is closed, the wilderness is gone, nature is being destroyed by human consumers, while billions are starving. The future indeed looks grim, and there are, ultimately, no really long-range, positive solutions, nor motivation for making the sacrifices and doing the hard work needed now, unless we understand that we are evolving from an Earth-only toward an Earth-space or universal species.

  Barbara Marx Hubbard

  Motivation, Hard Work, Sacrifice

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• The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.

  Philipp Meyer

  Children, Growing Up, Animal

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• I want to live in a world capital or the howling wilderness.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  World, Want

  Katherine Anne Porter, Joan Givner (1987). “Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations”, p.78, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• A man is skillful at woodraft just in proportion as he approaches this balance. Knowing the wilderness can be comfortable when a less experienced man would endure hardship. Conversely, if a man endures hardships where a woodsman could be comfortable, it argues not his toughness, but his ignorance or foolishness, which is exactly the case with our blatant friend of the drawing-room reputation.

  Stewart Edward White

  Ignorance, Men, Drawing

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• There are for starters, grandeur and silence, pure water and clean air. There is also the gift of distance ... the chance to stand away from relationships and daily ritual ... and the gift of energy. Wilderness infuses us with its own special brand of energy.

  Linn Thomas

  Nature, Distance, Air

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• A vivid tale of exploration set in a howling, deadly wilderness.

  T. J. Stiles

  Vivid, Exploration, Tales

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• It ain’t wilderness unless there’s a critter out there that can kill you and eat you.

  Doug Peacock

  Critters

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• The whole concept of 'wild' was decidedly European, one not shared by the original inhabitants of this continent. What we called 'wilderness' was to the Indian a homeland, 'abiding loveliness' in Salish or Piegan. The land was not something to be feared or conquered, and 'wildlife' were neither wild nor alien; they were relatives.

  Doug Peacock

  Land, Wildlife, Abiding

  Doug Peacock (2011). “Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness”, p.185, Macmillan

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• What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Peace, Nature, Reflection

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• How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, oh, Father, What have you done with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here? Said louisa as she touched her heart.

  Charles Dickens

  Father, Heart, Garden

  Charles Dickens “Hard Times”, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Wildness is not just the "preservation of the world," it is the world

  Gary Snyder

  World, Preservation, Wildness

  Gary Snyder (2010). “The Practice of the Wild”, p.6, Counterpoint Press

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

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Science, Law, Precedent

  "Aylmer's Field" st. 18 (1864)

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• Anytime that is ‘betwixt and between’ or transitional is the faeries’ favorite time. They inhabit transitional spaces: the bottom of the garden, existing in a space between manmade cultivation and wilderness. Look for them in the space between nurture and nature, they are to be found at all boarders and boundaries, or on the edges of water where it is neither land nor lake, neither path nor pond. They come when we are half-asleep. They come at moments when we least expect them; when our rational mind balances with the fluid irrational.

  Brian Froud

  Garden, Lakes, Land

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• I would never go to jail to protect animals or plants or wilderness. For me, it’s about the people.

  Tim DeChristopher

  Animal, Jail, People

  "What Love Looks Like". Interview with Terry Tempest Williams, orionmagazine.org. May 28, 2011.

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• Welcome to The Daily Show, I'm John Oliver. Jon Stewart is still not here. He is currently living out a live-action Lord of the Rings role-playing experience deep in the New Zealand wilderness.

  John Oliver

  Role Playing, Roles, Welcome

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• I discovered a version of the sinner's prayer that increased my faith far more than the one that I had said years earlier...In this version, there were no formulas, no set phrases that promised us safe passage across the abyss. There was only our tattered trust that the Spirit who had given us life would not leave us in the wilderness without offering us life again.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Prayer, Offering, Years

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• She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.

  Marguerite Duras

  Memories, Kissing, People

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• I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beautiful, Men, Horizon

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.37, Harvard University Press

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• A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be - will be - a human zoo. A high-tech slum.

  Edward Abbey

  Zoos, Snakes, Earth Day

  Edward Abbey (2006). “Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast”

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• The fight for free space-for wilderness and for public space-must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true-crime titillations, and celebrity crises.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Fighting, Journey, Hiking

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• When man ventures into the wilderness, climbs the ridges, and sleeps in the forest, he comes in close communion with his Creator. When man pits himself against the mountain, he taps inner springs of his strength. He comes to know himself.

  William O. Douglas

  Spring, Sleep, Journey

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• Wilderness, like the national park system, was an American idea.

  Stewart Udall

  Ideas, National Parks, Parks

  "IDEAS & TRENDS; A Rising American Impulse To Leave the Land Alone" by Philip Shabecoff, www.nytimes.com. June 11, 1989.

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