Quotes About Wilderness

Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander.

Camp-keeping in the Delta was not all beer and skittles.

it is disquieting to feel that the conversion into a National Forest or Park always means the esthetic death of a piece of wild country.

And in this annual barter of food for light, and winter warmth for summer solitude, the whole continent receives as net profit a wild poem dropped from the murky skies upon the muds of March.

The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.

Thus always does history, whether or marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

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

I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.

There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.

Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.

All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

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?

This view of a living nature where man is nothing is both odd and sad. Here, in a fertile land, in an eternal greenness, you search in vain for traces of man; you feel you are carried into a different world from the one you were born into.

The mind I love must have wild places: a tangled orchard where damsons drop in heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, a chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody has fathomed the depths of... and paths threaeded with flowers planted by the mind." Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulnes

So my brain is as stuffed as some old broken-down Commodore you see left in the bush.

I love the sound of the horn, at night, in the depth of the woods.

God! how sad is the sound of the horn deep in the woods!

Blessed is the era that can honestly claim that it is not a desert wilderness. Woe, however, to the era in which the voices calling in the wilderness have fallen silent, shouted down by the noise of the day, or prohibited, or drowned in the intoxication with progress, or restricted and quiet out of fear and cowardice.

Someone who goes through this wilderness among mankind again and again as the Seeker, and as the Caller, You can sense that that this is more than the call of man, or a power, or a greatness, or a thirst for dominance, or a violent force. This is the Calling God, who calls out in the midst of the wilderness through voices of men. He has filled them, and their very documents that such perfected people are among us sent by God.

Some days I would go without any fire at all, and eat raw frozen meat and melt snow in my mouth for water.

The more I see of deer, the more I admire them as mountaineers. They make their way into the heart of the roughest solitudes with smooth reserve of strength, through dense belts of brush and forest encumbered with fallen trees and boulder piles, across canons, roaring streams, and snow-fields, ever showing forth beauty and courage.

I found out some really cool ways to swing around the Winchester.

I don't like concrete jungles.

I don't think I'd ever really survive the outdoors.