Wilderness Quotes

The earth's vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the earth, between plants and other plants, between plants and animals. Sometimes we have no choice but to disturb these relationships, but we should do so thoughtfully, with full awareness that what we do may have consequences remote in time and place.

Rachel Carson†

The great purpose is to set aside a reasonable part of the vanishing wilderness, to make certain that generations of Americans yet unborn will know what it is to experience life on undeveloped, unoccupied land in the same form and character as the Creator fashioned it... It is a great spiritual experience. I never knew a man who took a bedroll into an Idaho mountainside and slept there under a star-studded summer sky who felt self-important that next morning. Unless we preserve some opportunity for future generations to have the same experience, we shall have dishonored our trust

Frank Church†

You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.

Rene Daumal

That wonderful world of high mountains, dazzling in their rock and ice, acts as a catalyst. It suggests the infinite but it is not the infinite. The heights only give us what we ourselves bring them

Lucien Devies

The tallgrass prairie dazzles the eye with an unending array of blooming plants, and this spectacle, with some seventeen new species coming into bloom each week, lasts from March until October. The tallgrasses themselves, big bluestem, indiangrass, switchgrass, and cordgrass, to name the common ones, are the most powerful, the most expansive, the most majestic of all the prairie plants; they are the redwoods of the prairie.

Patricia D. Duncan

Dandelions are the supreme symbol of the failure of human control, a yellow flag of mockery, and every time we burned that flag, back it comes, stronger than ever. No plants or animal is as obstinately perverse in its flaunting of human wishes.

David Ehrenfeld†

Land is immortal, for its harbors the mysteries of creation.

Anwar el-Sadat†

No land is bad, but land is worse. If a man owns land, the land owns him. Now let him leave home, if he dare.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds have no title.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awakened people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good flammable stuff, it will catch fire.

Anatole France†

I do not know of a flowering plant that tastes good and is poisonous. Nature is not out to get you.

Euell Gibbons†

What America does not do well is anticipate and avoid problems. Unfortunately, many environmental phenomena involve thresholds that, when passed, caused damage that is essentially irreversible. If we wait until the damage occurs and then respond, it will be too late.

Denis Hayes†

I... thanked the Author of my being for the gift of that wild forest, those green mansions where I had found so great a happiness!

William Henry Hudson

Her mighty lakes, like oceans of liquid silver; her mountains with their right aerial tints; her valleys, teeming with wild fertility; her tremendous cataracts, thundering in their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure; her brought deep rivers, rolling in solemn silence to the ocean; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts forth all its magnificence; her skies, kindling waves in the magic of the summer clouds and glorious sunshine; -- no, never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery

Washington Irving†

Making a town more beautiful and more human can lessen tensions and friction. Any city can do it; and any city would do well to do it.

Lady Bird Johnson