Quotes About Wilderness

red-trunked rhododendron trees looked like so many writhing russet snakes. In some places the forest floor was carpeted crimson with fallen rhododendron petals.

There was something of the wildwood in the man who came and went illusive as moonlight moving through the branches.

Weeds are nature's graffiti.

Taming the Lone Wolff #2236 Silhouette

In the wild world, relationship is evolutionary, time is geologic, beauty is intelligent. There we find ourselves under a powerful spell.

Although I was reared on a junkyard by parents who did not waste time hiking or camping, I knew pine trees and pitcher plants, bobcats and brown thrashers, as my people.

the wilderness "builds receptivity" to the idea that we owe moral obligations to other beings.

When you wake up to kingdom realities, you find that you are tracing the steps of both the Israelites and Jesus himself into the wilderness. . . . The wilderness is the place where God meets his people, Satan attacks, and kingdom allegiances are revealed. [Ed Welch, Running Scared, 118]

From a lofty perch Tarzan viewed the village of thatched huts across the intervening plantation.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

If you don't think it's lonesome wandering all by yourself through savage, unknown Pellucidar, why, just try it, and you will not wonder that I was glad of the company of this first dog

Tarzan was wishing that they might walk on thus forever. If the girl were only a man they might. He longed for a friend who loved the same wild life that he loved. He had learned to crave companionship, but it was his misfortune that most of the men he knew preferred immaculate linen and their clubs to nakedness and the jungle. It was, of course, difficult to understand, yet it was very evident that they did.

You didn't find any trace of her? asked d'Arnot. // Tarzan shook his head. None. In the jungle, I could have found her; but here –-here, in civilization, a man cannot even find himself.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

For this is the considerate way of dogs; and of cats as well. When dire sickness smites them, they do not hang about, craving sympathy and calling for endless attention. All they want is to get out of the way,—well out of the way, into the woods and swamps and mountains; where they may wrestle with their life-or-death problem in their own primitive manner; and where, if need be, they may die alone and peacefully, without troubling anyone else.

A poet would have vowed that the still and white-shrouded wilderness was a shrine sacred to solitude and severe peace. Lad could have told him better. Nature (beneath the surface) is never solitary and never at peace.

The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.

What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

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.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.

It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.

The boundary between tame and wild exists only in the imperfections of the human mind.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes