Wilderness Quotes

Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.

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

There are no idealists in the plant world and no compassion. The rose and the morning glory know no mercy. Bindweed, the morning glory, will quickly choke its competitors to death, and the fencerow rose will just as quietly crowd out any other plant that tried to share its roothold. Idealism and mercy are human terms and human concepts.

Swift or smooth, broad as the Hudson or narrow enough to scrape your gunwales, every river is a world of its own, unique in pattern and personality. Each mile on a river will take you further from home than a hundred miles on a road
Paul Brooks

If we lose wilderness, we lose forever the knowledge of what the world was and what it might, with understanding and loving husbandry, yet become.
Harvey Broome

To me, a wilderness is where the flow of wildness is essentially uninterrupted by technology; without wilderness the world is a cage
David Brower

Do not feed children on a maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature. Let their souls drink in all that is pure and sweet. Rear them, if possible, amid pleasant surroundings ... Let nature teach them the lessons of good and proper living, combined with an abundance of well-balanced nourishment. Those children will grow to be the best men and women. Put the best in them by contact with the best outside. They will absorb it as a plant absorbs the sunshine and the dew.
Luther Burbank

The forest stretched no living man knew how far. That was the dead, sealed world of the vegetable kingdom, and uncharted continent with interlocking trees, living, dead, half-dead, their roots in bogs and swamps, strangling each other in a slow agony that had lasted for centuries. The forest was suffocation, annihilation.
Willa Cather†

(Michael Astroff) says that forests are the ornaments of the earth, that they teach mankind to understand beauty and attune his mind to lofty sentiments. Forests temper a stern climate, and in countries where the climate is milder, less strength is wasted in the battle with nature, and the people are kind and gentle.
Anton Chekhov†

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.

..... 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.

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.

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.

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.



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