Wildness Quotes

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

  John Muir

  Lying, Yosemite, World

  "Alaska Fragment" (1890)

  71 Copy quote

  Show source

• In wildness is the preservation of the world.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Camping, World, Transcendentalism

  "Walking" (1862)

  37 Copy quote

  Show source

• To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Nature, Mean, Science

  Terry Tempest Williams (2008). “Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert”, p.75, Vintage

  111 Copy quote

  Show source

• Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

  Edward Abbey

  Nature, Insperational, Hiking

  Edward Abbey (1968). “Desert Solitaire”, p.169, Simon and Schuster

  83 Copy quote

  Show source

• To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic. True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.

  Robert Bly

  Nature, Crazy, Voice

  116 Copy quote

• Wildness It is perennially within us, dormant as a hard-shelled seed, awaiting the fire or flood that awakes it again.

  Gary Snyder

  Fire, Dormant, Flood

  Gary Snyder (2010). “The Practice of the Wild”, p.14, Counterpoint Press

  83 Copy quote

  Show source

• The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild, and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Names, West

  "Walking" (1862)

  28 Copy quote

  Show source

• The most alive is the wildest.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Alive

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Walking: Top Essays”, p.11, 谷月社

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Civilization, Giving, Glances

  Henry David Thoreau, David Gross (2007). “The Price of Freedom: Political Philosophy from Thoreau's Journals”, p.48, David M Gross

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming.

  Shauna Niequist

  Healing, Becoming, Seasons

  23 Copy quote

• What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents.
  Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.

  Jay Griffiths

  Fire, Ice Water, Air

  Jay Griffiths (2007). “Wild: An Elemental Journey”, p.168, Penguin UK

  51 Copy quote

  Show source

• Without wilderness, the world's a cage.

  David R. Brower

  World, Cages, Wilderness

  21 Copy quote

• We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Sea, Land, Environmental

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Thoreau on Nature: Sage Words on Finding Harmony with the Natural World”, p.38, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• What we like about women is sensuality, wildness, hormones. Women who make a song and dance about their intuition.

  Yasmina Reza

  Song, Women, Intuition

  20 Copy quote

• Hidden in the glorious wildness like unmined gold.

  John Muir

  Gold, Glorious

  John Muir, Edwin Way Teale, Henry Bugbee Kane (2001). “The Wilderness World of John Muir”, p.242, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• God of wilderness, God of wildness, lead me to the quiet places of my soul. In stillness, in openness, may I find my strength.

  Jan L. Richardson

  Strength, Soul, May

  19 Copy quote

• 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.

  John Muir

  Nature, Men, Animal

  19 Copy quote

• To me, a wilderness is where the flow of wildness is essentially uninterrupted by technology; without wilderness the world is a cage.

  David R. Brower

  Technology, World, Flow

  14 Copy quote

• Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Inspirational, Real, Lying

  Charles A. Lindbergh (1992). “Autobiography of Values”, Harcourt

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• What can educators do to foster real intelligence?.. .We can attempt to teach the things that one might imagine the earth would teach us: silence, humility, holiness, connectedness, courtesy, beauty, celebration, giving, restoration, obligation, and wildness.

  David W. Orr

  Beauty, Teacher, Real

  71 Copy quote

• Love is a powerful tool, and maybe, just maybe, before the last little town is corrupted and the last of the unroaded and undeveloped wildness is given over to dreams of profit, maybe it will be love, finally, love for the land for its own sake and for what it holds of beauty and joy and spiritual redemption that will make [wilderness] not a battlefield but a revelation.

  T. H. Watkins

  Dream, Spiritual, Powerful

  45 Copy quote

• In God's wildness lies the hope of the world-the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.

  John Muir

  Lying, Healing, Civilization

  "Alaska Fragment" (1890)

  33 Copy quote

  Show source

• And the headbonny ash that sits over the burn.
  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.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins

  Weed, Nature, Long

  1881 'Inversnaid'.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• All humans are essentially wild creatures and hate confinement. We need what is wild, and we thrill to it, our wildness bubbling over with an anarchic joie de vivre. We glint when the wild light shines. The more suffocatingly enclosed we are - tamed by television, controlled by mortgages and bureaucracy - the louder our wild genes scream in aggression, anger and depression.

  Jay Griffiths

  Hate, Light, Shining

  7 Copy quote
• 

  Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.

  John Muir

  Travel, Home, Tired

  "Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, My First Summer in the Sierra, the Mountains of California, Stickeen, Selected Essays".

  223 Copy quote

  Show source