Wilderness Quotes

“In Wildness is the preservation of the world.”

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

“He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness.”

“The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.”

“It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.”

“wilderness”

“Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own.”

“Wikipedia: Wilderness”

“Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.”

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.”

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

“We are all travelers in … the wilderness of this world … and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend.”

“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.”

“Many of the attributes most distinctive of America and Americans are the impress of the wilderness. … Shall we now exterminate this thing that made us Americans?”

“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.”

“If I had my way about national parks, I would create one without a road in it. I would have it impenetrable forever to automobiles, a place where man would not try to improve upon God.”

“Beauty is a resource in and of itself. … I hope the United States of America is not so rich that she can afford to let these wildernesses pass by, or so poor she cannot afford to keep them.”

“I tried to break the spell — the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness — that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions.”

“Large events to us but to these mountains? Nothing. That's what I love about the empty places of the world; places with few people and little to see save earth, sky, mountains and cold, cold stars. They help me keep matters in perspective.”

“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”