Wilderness Quotes

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
― John Muir

“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, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.”
― Aldo Leopold

“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, Our National Parks

“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.”
― Chris Maser, Forest Primeval: The Natural History of an Ancient Forest

“Sometimes when you lose your way, you find YOURSELF.”
― Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass

“Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.

It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

“If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.”
― Vera Nazarian

“Wildness is the preservation of the World.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walking

“There is a love of wild nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties”
― John Muir

“Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.”
― Robert MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit

“To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“Ô, Wanderess, Wanderess
When did you feel your
most euphoric kiss?
Was I the source
of your greatest bliss?”
― Roman Payne

“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.”
― Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces

“The sea is a desert of waves,
A wilderness of water.”
― Langston Hughes, Selected Poems

“Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.”
― Jimmy Carter

“A thousand times, people may have touched each other, but never ever sensed a single vein of oneness or complicity in the wilderness of their inner world, since obdurate mental impediments have been barricading the road to understanding and propinquity. ( “A thousand times” )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“The Wilderness holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask.”
― Nancy Newhall

“Love can be a land of wilderness, a wasteland of lost dreams in the backwoods of our muddled emotions, or it can be a heaven of ecstasy with an abundance of surrender, resplendent with acceptance and dependability.( “Twilight of desire” )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“We had no choice. Sadness was a dangerous as panthers and bears. the wilderness needs your whole attention.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“It was like hiking into a Hemingway story; everything was sepia-toned and bristling with subtext.”
― Leslie What, Crazy Love

“I had learnt the satisfaction which comes from hardship and the pleasure which derives from abstinence; the contentment of a full belly; the richness of meat; the taste of clean water; the ecstasy of surrender when the craving of sleep becomes a torment; the warmth of a fire in the chill of dawn.”
― Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands

“Chaos,
leave me never,
keep me wild
and keep me free
so that my
brokenness will be,
the only beauty
the world will see.”
― Robert M. Drake, Black Butterfly

“Devoted though we must be to the conservation cause, I do not believe that any of us should give it all of our time or effort or heart. Give what you can, but do not burn yourselves out -- or break your hearts. Let us save at least half of our lives for the enjoyment of this wonderful world which still exists. Leave your dens, abandon your cars and walk out into the great mountains, the deserts, the forests, the seashores. Those treasures still belong to all of us. Enjoy them to the full, stretch your legs, expand your lungs, enliven your hearts -- and we will outlive the greedy swine who want to destroy it all in the name of what they call GROWTH.
God bless America -- let's save some of it.
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet!”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing. I suppose some will wish to debate whether it is important to keep these primitive arts alive. I shall not debate it. Either you know it in your bones, or you are very, very old.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“Quoting Viola Davis (who is sharing rules she lives by):

'4. I will not be a mystery to my daughter. She will know me and I will share my stories with her—the stories of failure, shame, and accomplishment. She will know she’s not alone in that wilderness.”
― Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone