Wilderness Quotes

The west coast is a mecca for wild hearts, wild minds, wild spirits and I’m a WMD—I’ve got so much energy I’m about to explode.

~ Shannon Mullen

Among wilderness survival tips, punching a wild animal in the face probably isn’t on a checklist.

~ Kat Kruger

I watched the surrounding landscape with great curiosity, and I wanted to discover the words that could describe all its unspoiled beauty.

~ Daniel J. Rice

What else can we do in the wilderness, than to wonder?

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

~ Aldo Leopold

She wasted and grew so thin that she no longer was a little girl, but the shadow of a little girl. The flame of her life flickered so faintly that it appeared sufficient to blow at it to extinguish it. Stas understood that death did not have to wait for a third attack to take her and he expected it any day or any hour.

~ Henryk Sienkiewicz

If you reconnect with nature and the wilderness you will not only find the meaning of life, but you will experience what it means to be truly alive.

~ Sylvia Dolson

Slowly, deliberately, the dog turned from the black wolf and walked toward the man. He was a dog, and dogs chose men.

~ Jim Kjelgaard

...environment scarcely recognises a political frontier.

~ T.c. Smout

...no other life form needed man, man needed all the others in which to survive.

~ Barry Babcock

If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.

~ Edward Abbey

The sea is a desert of waves,A wilderness of water.

~ Langston Hughes

James hoped the newsletter would garner support from Bahana, or white people, to stop a town well that the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted to dig and a tower it wanted to erect to store the water. The Hotevilla elders were willing to lay down their lives in this battle. They’d done it before, preventing the BIA from bringing electricity to the village by lying down in front of bulldozers. If that well went in, James explained, people would waste water. Their spring would dry out- an unthinkable tragedy, as it would make it impossible for them to live there any longer. Could two cultures be any different? I now wondered. We were taking federal money to mine water and would do so until the unlikely day that same government made us stop. The Hopi had been trying to prevent the government from giving them a well in the first place.

~ Julene Bair

Every morning in the middle of nowhere, without electricity or anyone to impress, I'd take great care in picking out my outfit and hover in front of a business card-size mirror to apply my lip gloss and check my eyebrows. I also felt I had a strong case for bringing a little black dress on expeditions. Village parties spring up more often than you might expect, and despite never having been a Girl Scout, I like to be prepared.

~ Mireya Mayor

You carry the message you've been seeking, but realization of it is found in healthy retrospection, not among the wilderness of chaotic noise.

~ T.f. Hodge

Maybe freedom really is nothing left to lose. You had it once in childhood, when it was okay to climb a tree, to paint a crazy picture and wipe out on your bike, to get hurt. The spirit of risk gradually takes its leave. It follows the wild cries of joy and pain down the wind, through the hedgerow, growing ever fainter. What was that sound? A dog barking far off? That was our life calling to us, the one that was vigorous and undefended and curious.

~ Peter Heller

At most, a hundred paces separated him from them. The powerful beast, seeing the riders and horses, rose on his fore paws and began to gaze at them. The sun, which now stood low, illuminated his huge head and shaggy breasts, and in that ruddy luster he was like one of those sphinxes which ornament the entrances to ancient Egyptian temples.

~ Henryk Sienkiewicz

The shots had dispersed the birds; there remained only two marabous, standing between ten and twenty paces away and plunged in reverie. They were like two old men with bald heads pressed between the shoulders.

~ Henryk Sienkiewicz

The Wilderness holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask.

~ Nancy Wynne Newhall

He stood there a moment, listened to the creek, and let the mountain air blow against his face. Even with all this heartache, it was beautiful here.

~ Eowyn Ivey

We smoked fat cigars by the campfire and they tasted like wood and ash. The inhale and exhale was exciting. Blowing smoke rings in the calm forest air was followed by a deep swallow of cheap beer, and this too was exciting. There was no judgment in the wild, and so indulgences were plentiful. There were no regulators here and we were free to indulge in the deep intoxications that made our minds free.

~ Daniel J. Rice

It’s mostly during times of wilderness experience, that people are willing to accept the lessonsthat wisdom teaches

~ Sunday Adelaja

...we do not own these woods. They own us.

~ Timothy Goodwin

I thought how wise he was to lure his rival out into the woods, where every fight's fair.

~ Peter Geye

Every falling leaf reminds me that I too will soon be separated from these trees. Trying to capture freedom is like trying to catch a falling leaf. Occasionally you may grab one out of the air and hold it in your hands, but now what?

~ Daniel J. Rice

I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time.

~ Bill Mckibben

We are the wilderness withinScreaming out for true expression.Even when we’re sleeping,There’s no escape from this obsession.

~ Jay Woodman

There was a wildness inside him; someday he would capture it. Not to be tamed, but to be released. For only by understanding his mind could it be freed.

~ Daniel J. Rice

For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats;And men are whithered before their primeBy the curse paved in with the lanes and streets.And lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed, In the smothering reek of mill and mine;And death stalks in on the struggling crowd—But he shuns the shadow of the oak and pine

~ George Washington Sears

When you are facing the wilderness on your own, you have a totally different attitude to someone who works in government or who has a monthly cheque.

~ Rick Santelli

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

~ Edward Abbey

I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.

~ Walt Disney

In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.

~ Charles Lindbergh

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

~ James Russell Lowell

They can see the brave silhouette from almost anywhere in the District of Columbia and use it as a compass to locate other monuments and eventually to find their way out of the great, gray federal wilderness.

~ Hugh Sidey

We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.

~ John Hope Franklin

To the lover of wilderness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.

~ John Muir

The spirit of L.A. is untamed wilderness. It's earthquakes and wildfires and oceans and mountain lions and fog. There's great physical beauty.

~ Dan Gilroy

Be bored and see where it takes you, because the imagination's dusty wilderness is worth crossing if you want to sculpt your soul.

~ Nancy Gibbs

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

~ Henry David Thoreau