Quotes on Wilderness

The interior deprives men of their senses. Here, the eerie stillness of the wilderness and the darkness of night render the men both deaf and blind. Without eyes or ears, they have no frame of reference-and without a frame of reference, they have no clear identities.

Wilderness trails constitute a rare space in America marked by economic diversity. Lawyers and construction workers get bitten by the same mosquitoes and sip from the same streams; there are none of the usual signals about socioeconomic status, for most hikers are in shorts and a T-shirt and enveloped by an aroma that would make a skunk queasy.

One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.

The wooing of the Earth thus implies much more than converting the wilderness into humanized environments. It means also preserving natural environments in which to experience mysteries transcending daily life and from which to recapture, in a Proustian kind of remembrance, the awareness of the cosmic forces that have shaped humankind.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

To the lover of pure wildness Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.

The mountains are calling and I must go.

These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!

One day's exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books.

I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness.

Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Only to the white man was nature a 'wilderness'.

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love him.

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

If you look throughout human history ... the central epiphany of every religious tradition always occurs in the wilderness.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

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.

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.