Quotes About Wilderness

My father... removed from Kentucky to... Indiana, in my eighth year... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up... Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher... but that was all.

I could never resist the call of the trail.

I was hiking a five-day loop - alone - in the Rocky Mountains when I rounded the switchback and saw a large body on the trail ahead. It had brown fur with a cinnamon tinge that was draped across dense, humped back muscle. A broad head lifted and I could see the dish-shaped muzzle was catching my scent. I knew bears. This was a grizzly.

L.A. is full of great hiking trails.

In the jungle I was free, yet the place was like a jail without walls.

Not by human dwellings--not in crowded cities alone, are the sights and sounds of life. The wildest places of the earth are full of them.

Our persecutors are swifter than the eagles of the heaven: they pursued us upon the mountains, they laid wait for us in the wilderness.—Lamentations

The unattended garden will soon be overrun with weeds; the heart that fails to cultivate truth and root out error will shortly be a theological wilderness.

In woods where the woodsmen told lies, maybe it was the wolves who told the truth.

I hunt therefore I am.

and into Malibu Canyon to the Saddle Peak

I am most heartily glad that I am not going to the dangerous and uncertain Black Hills.

This disaster was caused by environmentalists charged with protecting the wilderness, who made one dreadful mistake after another—and, along the way, proved how little they understood the environment they intended to protect.

It's the city's crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads, but you find it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city; that if you dug beneath it you would find the ruins of another, older city, and then another and another.

The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion

It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.

Our ignorance of the teeming wilderness that is the soil (even the act of regarding it as a wilderness) is no impediment to nurturing it. To the contrary, a healthy sense of all we don't know--even a sense of mystery--keeps us from reaching for oversimplifications and technological silver bullets.

In wildness is the preservation of the world," Thoreau once wrote; a century later

Good gardens often seem to have this quality, of order under a certain amount of pressure, wilderness just barely contained. They make something of the fact that nature seems to resist our forms, turn this fact of fate to good account.

On the 27th we came to the Cascade Rapids. The first or Little Cascade has about two feet fall, the second or Grand Cascade, a mile farther, is about a six foot sheer drop.

I love to hike, fly-fish, and ski in the mountains where I live in Colorado.

I want to shoot an elk with a bow. Mind you, I've never hunted in my life. But I feel like if I'm ever going to hunt, it's going to be with a bow. I just feel like a bow requires more skill.

That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.

Like the creatures of the forest and the sea, I love To lose myself for a while.