Wilderness Quotes

Believe one who knows; you will find something greater in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.

St. Bernard de Clairvaux†

There can be no greater moral obligation in the environmental field than to ease out the living space and replace dereliction by beauty.

Frank Fraser Darling†

To no one's landscape, to feel in sympathy with it, is often to be at peace with life. When all of the world seems wrong and the burdens overwhelming he can look out on the familiar fields and hills or get among them and give way to their beauties of form and color as a resource within himself that will be an ever-present power of recuperation.

Richard E. Dodge

Man is whole when he is in tune with the winds, the stars, and the hills... Being in tune with the universe is the entire secrets.

William O. Douglas

..... to be whole and harmonious, man must also know the music of the beaches and the woods. He must find the thing of which he is only an infinitesimal part and nurture it and love it, if he is to live.

William O. Douglas

The Arctic has a call that is compelling. The distant mountains [of the Brooks Range in Alaska] make one want to go on and on over the next ridge and over the one beyond. The call is that of a wilderness known only to a few...This last American wilderness must remain sacrosanct.

William O. Douglas

The wilderness is a place of rest -- not in the sense of being motionless, for the lure, after all, is to move, to round the next bend. The rest comes in the isolation from distractions, in the slowing of the daily centrifugal forces that keep us off balance.

David Douglas

The wooing of the Earth thus implies much more than converting the wilderness into humanized environments. It means also preserving natural environments in which to experience mysteries transcending daily life and from which to recapture, in a Proustian kind of remembrance, the awareness of the cosmic forces that have shaped humankind.

Rene Dubos†

When all the dangerous cliffs are fenced off, all the trees that might fall on people are cut down,all of the insects that bite are poisoned... and all of the grizzlies are dead because they are occasionally dangerous, the wilderness will not be made safe. Rather, the safety will have destroyed the wilderness.

R. Yorke Edwards

Sometimes the rarer, the beautiful can only emerge or survive in isolation. In a similar manner, some degree of withdrawal serves to nurture man's creative powers. The artist and scientist bring out of the dark void, like the mysterious universe itself, the unique, the strange, and unexpected.

Loren Eiseley

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot†

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson†

Without enough wilderness America will change. Democracy, with its myriad personalities and increasing sophistication, must be fibred and vitalized by the regular contact with outdoor growths -- animals, trees, sun warmth, and free skies -- or it will dwindle and pale.

Ralph Waldo Emerson†

At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Plants are the young of the world. Vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect man, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.

Ralph Waldo Emerson