Quotes About Wilderness

We cannot overlook the importance of wild country as source of inspiration, to which we give expression in writing, in poetry, drawing and painting, in mountaineering, or in just being there.

Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

Here in this endless and gleaming wildernessI was removed farther than ever from the world of men --And I never saw so close and so clearlyThe image in the mirror of my own soul.

The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's.

I know he'd be a poorer man if he never saw an eagle fly.

Every sacred soul must walk and keep the way of God in the wilderness for years, to begin the sacred writings.

Living in a big city can be compared to existing in a jungle. One becomes a creature of the environment. The response to the rhythms and choreography is visceral and before long a dweller's conduct is as distinctive as those of a jungle inhabitant.

Within 10 years it will be impossible to travel to the North Pole by dog team. There will be too much open water.

Along a plateau the traveller passes the reservoir, the Wachusett Reservoir, its bank more or less covered with pines, to West Boylston, a village by the lakeside. "Mount" Wachusett looks over the wilderness from Clinton northward.

Down the mountain wallsFrom where Pan's cavern isIntolerable music falls.Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,Belly, shoulder, bum,Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrsCopulate in the foam.

One had a lovely face, And two or three had charm, But charm and face were in vain Because the mountain grass Cannot but keep the form Where the mountain hare has lain. - Memory

But the sea which no one tends is also a garden

Oh to have a lodge in some vast wilderness. Where rumors of oppression and deceit, of unsuccessful and successful wars may never reach me anymore.

The trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past.

Heed not the night; a summer lodge amid the wild is mine - 'Tis shadowed by the tulip-tree, 'tis mantled by the vine.

I would make Reason my guide, but she should sometimes sit Patiently by the way-side, while I traced The mazes of the pleasant wilderness Around me. She should be my counsellor, But not my tyrant. For the spirit needs Impulses from a deeper source than hers, And there are motions, in the mind of man, That she must look upon with awe.

All at once A fresher wind sweeps by, and breaks my dream, And I am in the wilderness alone.

He stayed out of the house, he was much of the time in the woods, he felt like some animal half domesticated but ultimately unable to resist the feral ways of the forest. The spring nights were fecund and warm and alive, and there were nights he did not come in at all.

When Tyler fled and Sutter pursued him, this was the closest thing to a wilderness there was, and there was really no thought of going anywhere else, and as these fugitives, mentor and protégé, fled from a world that still adhered to form and order they were fleeing not only geographically but chronologically, for they were fleeing into the past.

In summer the rich pond water was a vat of ripe simmering fruit, of varnish color: golden in the sun, holding like a rich syrup all the stock and plankton of the woods: loam-wealth, growth richness, leaf and sap goodness, the potlikker of the secret woods—all untouched and rare and gamy. There lolled fat, torpid, safe fish, bobbling languorously over in the thick piny syrup, bubbling their rubbery globules, like plump ripe fruit in their juices.

In the evening of that day, after completing my preparations, I supped on the remaining portions of the sloth, not suitable for preservation, roasting bits of fat on the coals and boiling the head and bones into a broth; and after swallowing the liquid I crunched the bones and sucked the marrow...

the good smell of wood smoke, a scent comforting and welcoming, the essence, it had always seemed to me, of where the human experience and the wilderness met.

A morel, tastiest mushroom there is. Been a long while since I went hunting morels. Here," he said to me. "Take this and go see if you can find any more along the river.

He reached down and pulled something from the ground, then held it out in his hand so that we could see. "A toadstool?" I said. He shook his head. "A morel, tastiest mushroom there is. Been a long while since I went hunting morels. Here," he said to me. "Take this and go see if you can find any more along the river.