Wilderness Quotes

The mist was all gone from the river now and the rapids sparkled and sang. They were still young as the land was young. We were there to enjoy it, and the great machines seemed far away.

Sigurd F. Olson

How often we speak of the great silences of the wilderness and of the importance of preserving them and the wonder and peace to be found there. When I think of them, I see the lakes and rivers of the North, the muskegs and expenses of tundra, the barren lands beyond all roads. I see the mountain ranges of the West and the high, rolling ridges of the Appalacians. I picture the deserts of the Southwest and their brilliant panoramas of color, the impenetrable swamp lands of the South. They will always be there and their beauty may not change, but should their silences be broken, they will never be the same.

Sigurd F. Olson

The thoughts of the earth are my thoughts. The voice of the earth is my voice. All that belongs to the earth belongs to me. All that surrounds the earth surrounds me. It is lovely indeed, it is lovely indeed.

Proverbs, Navajo Song

If you plan for a year, plant rice. If you plan for ten years, plant trees. If you plan for 100 years, educate your children.

Chinese Proverb

Pilgrimage to the place of the wise is to escape the flame of separation from Nature.

Old Sufi saying

How much wilderness do the wilderness-lovers want? ask those who would mine and dig and cut and dam in such sanctuary spots as these. The answer is easy: Enough so that there will be in the years ahead a little relief, a little quiet, a little relaxation, for any of our increasing millions who need and want it.

Wallace Stegner

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.

Hide Indian Saying

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

Henry David Thoreau

No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.

Garrett Hardin

We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."

Henry David Thoreau

The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth ... the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need -- if only we had the eyes to see

Edward Abbey†

A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself

Edward Abbey†

Wilderness is an anchor to windward. Knowing it is there, we can also know that we are still a rich nation, tending our resources as we should--not a people in despair searching every last nook and cranny of our land for a board of lumber, a barrel of oil, a blade of grass, or a tank of water.

Senator Clinton P. Anderson†

Plants are created for the sake of animals, and animals for the sake of men; the tame for our use and provision; the wild, at least for the greater part, for our provision also, or for some other advantageous purpose, as furnishing us with clothes, and the like.

Aristotle†

You may not ever travel to Maine to see the Furbish lousewort. But the weeds in any patch of natural vegetation issue the same challenge. We have survived, say the weeds, since the Cretaceous. Man is a mere novice in evolution compared with us. He hasn't yet learnt the secret of the weeds: how to create fail-safe communities.

Eric Ashby†

No beast has ever conquered the earth; and the natural world has never been conquered by muscular force

Liberty Hyde Baily

No site in the forest is without significance, not a glade, not a thicket that does not provide analogies to the labyrinth of human thoughts. Who among those people with a cultivated spirit, or whose heart has been wounded, can walk in a forest without the forest speaking to him?... If one searched for the causes of that sensation, at once solemn, simple, gentle, mysterious, that seizes one, perhaps it would be found in the sublime and ingenious spectacle of all the creatures obeying their destinies, immutably docile.

Honore de Balzac†

What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself.

Mollie Beatty†

Nature includes all of the universe and man is not only a part of nature, he is in it up to his neck

N.J. Berrill

Touch the earth, loved the earth, in honor the earth: her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirits in her solitary places.

Henry Beston

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

Bible

Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.

Bible

Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, not the trees.