Wilderness Quotes - Page 31

• Brigham Young lived to become immortal in history as an American Moses by leading his people through the wilderness into an unpromised land.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Land, People, Moses

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• It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights. Yes we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness. Yes we can.

  Barack Obama

  Night, Destiny, Yes We Can

  Barack Obama, (2008). “Change We Can Believe In”, p.222, Canongate Books

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• There is rest in this world nowhere except in Christ, the manifested love of God. Trust in excellence, and the better you become, the keener is the feeling of deficiency. Wrap up all in doubt, and there is a stern voice that will thunder at last out of the wilderness upon your dream.

  Frederick William Robertson

  Dream, Voice, Feelings

  Frederick William Robertson (1873). “Sermons Preached at Brighton”, p.109

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• If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true -- not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling. If there is a memory of paradise, paradise can exist, in some other place or country dimensionally reminiscent of our own. The sad stories live there too, but in that country, we know what they mean and why they happened. We make our way back from them, finding the way through a bountiful wilderness we begin to understand. Years are nothing: Story conquers all distance.

  Jayne Anne Phillips

  Country, Memories, Distance

  FaceBook post by Jayne Anne Phillips from Feb 25, 2012

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• The cry for peace will be a cry in the wilderness, so long as the spirit of nonviolence does not dominate millions of men and women.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Men, Long, Doe

  Mahatma Gandhi, Judith M. Brown (2008). “The Essential Writings”, p.56, Oxford University Press

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• Wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works. It not only offered an escape from society but also was an ideal stage for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his own soul. The solitude and total freedom of the wilderness created a perfect setting for either melancholy or exultation.

  Roderick Nash

  Exercise, Men, Perfect

  Roderick Nash (2001). “Wilderness and the American Mind”, p.47, Yale University Press

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• Thomson sought the wilderness, never seeking to tame it, but only to draw from it, its magic of tangle and season.

  Arthur Lismer

  Nature, Magic, Draws

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• The American Colossus was fiercely intent on appropriating and exploiting the riches of all continents - grasping with both hands, reaping where he had not sown, wasting what he thought would last forever. New railroads were opening new territory. The exploiters were pushing farther and farther into the wilderness. The man who could get his hands on the biggest slice of natural resources was the best citizen. Wealth and virtue were supposed to trot in double harness.

  Gifford Pinchot

  Men, Hands, Land

  Gifford Pinchot (1998). “Breaking New Ground”, p.23, Island Press

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• The point of the dragonfly's terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows,is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn'tbut that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.

  Annie Dillard

  Beautiful, Nature, Freedom

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• A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,--such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Poetry, Age, Honey

  Henry David Thoreau (1993). “Civil Disobedience, and Other Essays”, p.63, Courier Corporation

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• Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives.

  Mary Oliver

  Art, Mean, Poetry

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.106, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left, in my opinion, worth fighting for; or to be more exact, a completely industrialized United States is of no consequence to me.

  Aldo Leopold

  Fighting, United States, Opinion

  Letter to Wallace Grange, digicoll.library.wisc.edu. January 03, 1948.

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• I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.

  Paul Theroux

  Heart, Cities, Pessimistic

  "Author Paul Theroux on His Final African Journey". Interview with Veronica Gould Stoddart, www.usatoday.com. May 23, 2013.

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• It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered, before the adverse hosts could meet. A wide, and, apparently, an impervious boundary of forests, severed the possessions of the hostile provinces of France and England. The hardy colonist, and the trained European who fought at his side, frequently expended months in struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains, in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage in a more martial conflict.

  James F. Cooper

  War, Struggle, Book

  "The Last of the Mohicans". Book by James F. Cooper, 1826.

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• The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold, stronghold, freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of hemp--with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear ancestral Britain.

  James Lane Allen

  Book, Virginia, Remembrance

  James Lane Allen (2016). “The reign of law. A tale of the Kentucky hemp fields.”, p.2, Aegitas

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• It's not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades.

  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

  Understanding, Disappear, Planets

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• The same people in the Congress who are busy kicking holes in the social safety net are also those who would sell off the nation's forests for a song, give away its national parks, and trash its wilderness preserves; there is a connection between the two impulses.

  Paul Gruchow

  Song, Two, People

  Paul Gruchow (1997). “Boundary Waters: The Grace of the Wild”

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• Sometimes no matter how well you prepare, no matter how conservative your decision making, no matter how few Y chromosomes are along on your trip, you can still find yourself in a mud slide or a hurricane without a dry piece of clothing to your name. But those of us who have given our time and usually our hearts to outdoorsmen over the years know that, for many of them, it's not really a wilderness trip unless, MacGyver-like, they have to make a fire out of a pair of shorts, a glow stick, and a ketchup bottle; it's not really an adventure until someone gets airlifted out.

  Pam Houston

  Adventure, Heart, Years

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• it will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. this is true. unless a way is found to stabilize the nation's population, the parks can not be saved. or anything else worth a damn. wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment. for my own part i would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live in such a world.

  Edward Abbey

  War, Struggle, Survival

  Edward Abbey (1968). “Desert Solitaire”, p.52, Simon and Schuster

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• The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn't know where I was going until I got there.It was a place called the Bridge of the Gods.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Years, Seven Months, Bridges

  Cheryl Strayed (2012). “Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found”, p.30, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.

  Aldo Leopold

  Land, Doctors, People

  Aldo Leopold (2012). “For the Health of the Land: Previously Unpublished Essays And Other Writings”, p.197, Island Press

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• In the one instance, the dreamerloses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestionsuntilhe finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his musings,... forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Sight, Imagination, Vision

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• The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.

  Walter Lippmann

  Travel, Adventure, Usa

  Walter Lippmann (1914). “A Preface to Politics”

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• Wilderness designations should not be the result of a quid pro quo. They should rise or fall on their own merits.

  Nick Rahall

  Fall, Merit, Quid Pro Quo

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• 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.

  George B. Cortelyou

  Country, Airplane, Light

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