quotes about Wilderness
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You do not need to fly to the other side of the planet to find wilderness and beauty.
-- Alastair HumphreysSource : Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. June 12, 2013.
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Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.
-- Aldo Leopold -
I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
-- Aldo Leopold -
The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.
-- Aldo Leopold -
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It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it
-- Aldo Leopold -
Thomson sought the wilderness, never seeking to tame it, but only to draw from it, its magic of tangle and season.
-- Arthur Lismer -
There was only the cemetery itself, spread out in the moonlight like a soft grey hallucination, a stony wilderness of Victorian melancholy.
-- Audrey Niffenegger -
Wilderness is harder and harder to find these days on this beautiful planet, and we're abusing our planet to the point of almost no return.
-- Betty White -
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It is like living in a wilderness of mirrors. No fact goes unchallenged.
-- Bruce Babbitt -
One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.
-- C. S. Lewis -
The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.
-- Cheryl Strayed -
Time is the deepest wilderness in which we wander.
-- Christopher CokinosSource : Christopher Cokinos (2009). “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds”, p.53, Penguin
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It's not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes -
Wilderness is a temporary condition through which we are passing to the Promised Land.
-- Cotton Mather -
True wilderness is where you keep it, and real wilderness experience cannot be a sedentary one; you have to seek it out not seated, but afoot.
-- David R. Brower -
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It ain’t wilderness unless there’s a critter out there that can kill you and eat you.
-- Doug Peacock -
Wilderness and motors are incompatible and the former can best be experienced, understood and enjoyed when the machines are left behind where they belong -- on the superhighways and in the parking lots, on the reservoirs and in the marinas.
-- Edward Abbey -
Why this cult of wilderness?... because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.
-- Edward Abbey -
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All the great crimes of history, lest we forget, have their genesis in the moral wilderness of their times.
-- Eskinder Nega -
I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all, the lone trail is bestI'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.
-- Everett Ruess -
I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time.
-- Everett Ruess -
No one to love, none to caress, Left all alone in this world's wilderness.
-- Frank NorrisSource : Frank Norris (2012). “McTeague”, p.92, Penguin
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Between the head and feet of any given person is a billion miles of unexplored wilderness.
-- Gabrielle RothSource : "The Spiritual Power Of Dance" by Gabrielle Roth, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 15, 2011.
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Wildness is not just the "preservation of the world," it is the world
-- Gary Snyder -
Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!
-- George Eliot -
No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature's wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
-- Hannah -
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As a philosopher, I'm not obliged to explore every unknown wilderness.
-- Harry Frankfurt -
Without wilderness, we will eventually lose the capacity to understand America.

-- Harvey Broome -
If we lose wilderness, we lose forever the knowledge of what the world was.
-- Harvey Broome -
The end we know not; but we wander on, Down the regretful wilderness of time.
-- Henry AbbeySource : Henry Abbey, “Emmanuel”
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In wildness is the preservation of the world.
-- Henry David Thoreau -
The wilderness that has come to us out of the eternity of the past, we have the boldness to project into the eternity of the future.
-- Howard Zahniser -
There is in every American, I think, something of the old Daniel Boone - who, when he could see the smoke from another chimney, felt himself too crowded and moved further out into the wilderness.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey -
When man obliterates wilderness, he repudiates the life force, which put him on this planed in a bad way, and in a truly terrifying sense, he is on his own.
-- J. H. Rush -
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Until we find the meaning of the stories in our lives we're destined to wander in a wilderness even though we're in a promised land.
-- Jane KirkpatrickSource : FaceBook post by Jane Kirkpatrick from Jan 06, 2015
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Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging-place of wayfaring men!
-- JeremiahSource : "Book of Jeremiah", IX. 2, as quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations, p. 379-80, 1922.
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Wilderness is a necessity... there must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls...
-- John Muir -
It always seems to me odd to call a place a wilderness when every wilderness area in the US bristles with rules and regulations as to how you can behave, what you're allowed to do, and is patrolled by armed rangers enforcing the small print. They're parks, of course, not wildernesses at all.
-- Jonathan Raban -
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You cannot seriously address the destruction of wilderness without addressing the society that is destroying it.
-- Judi Bari -
I want to live in a world capital or the howling wilderness,
-- Katherine Anne Porter -
The wilderness needs your whole attention.
-- Laura Ingalls Wilder -
Wilderness without wildlife is just scenery.
-- Lois Crisler -
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For the Lakota there was no wilderness. Nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly.
-- Luther Standing BearSource : Luther Standing Bear (1978). “Land of the Spotted Eagle”, p.196, U of Nebraska Press
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Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear.
-- Margaret LaurenceSource : Margaret Laurence, Nora Foster Stovel (2001). “Long Drums and Cannons”, p.38, University of Alberta
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Wilderness itself is the basis of all our civilization. I wonder if we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness the right to live on?
-- Margaret Murie -
Life offstage has sometimes been a wilderness of unpredictables in an unchoreographed world.
-- Margot Fonteyn -
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We were basically strangers going off into the wilderness
-- Matt Prior -
Wilderness is not defined by the absence of certain activities, but rather by the presence of certain unique and invaluable characteristics.
-- Nick Rahall -
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We all understand that compromise is part of the legislative process, yet at the same time, I would submit that wilderness is not for sale.
-- Nick Rahall -
Wilderness designations should not be the result of a quid pro quo. They should rise or fall on their own merits.
-- Nick Rahall -
We all want Canaan without going through the wilderness.
-- Ravi Zacharias -
The way of a canoe is the way of the wilderness, and of a freedom almost forgotten.
-- Sigurd F. Olson -
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A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him.
-- Stanley Kunitz -
A vivid tale of exploration set in a howling, deadly wilderness.
-- T. J. Stiles -
The farther one gets into the wilderness, the greater is the attraction of its lonely freedom.
-- Theodore Roosevelt -
The beauty and charm of the wilderness are his for the asking, for the edges of the wilderness lie close beside the beaten roads of the present travel.
-- Theodore Roosevelt -
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None know how often the hand of God is seen in a wilderness but them that rove it for a man's life.
-- Thomas Cole -
No man is competent unless he can stalk alone and armed in the wilderness.
-- Townsend Whelen -
Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness.
-- William BradfordSource : Nathaniel Morton, William Bradford, Thomas Prince, Edward Winslow (1669). “New-England's Memorial”, p.23
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We are not so poor we must destroy our wilderness, nor so rich we can afford to.
-- Newton B. Drury -
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We're not so poor that we have to spend our wilderness or so rich that we can afford to.
-- Newton B. Drury -
The way to war is a well-paved highway and the way to peace is still a wilderness.
-- Paul P. Harris -
The wilderness within us is actually the best part of us.
-- Stephen Marche -
It ain’t wilderness unless there’s a critter out there that can kill you and eat you.
-- Doug Peacock -
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Wilderness is not so much a place, but a feeling about one.
-- Roderick Nash -
Take away wilderness and you take away the opportunity to be American.
-- Roderick NashSource : Roderick Frazier Nash (2014). “Wilderness and the American Mind: Fifth Edition”, p.262, Yale University Press
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As one who has often felt this need, and who has found refreshment in wild places, I attest to the recreational value of wilderness.
-- George Aiken -
Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.
-- Tom C. Clark -