Wilderness Quotes

A flower's structure leads a bee toward having pollen adhere to its body . . . we don't know of any such reason why beautiful places attract humans.

David Rains Wallace

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity...

John Muir

All good things are wild, and free.

Henry David Thoreau

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

I have lately been surveying the Walden woods so extensively and minutely that I now see it mapped in my minds eye - as, indeed, on paper - as so many mens wood-lots, and am aware when I walk there that I am at a given moment passing from such a ones wood-lot to such anothers. I fear this particular dry knowledge may affect my imagination and fancy, that it will not be easy to see so much wildness and native vigor there as formerly.

Henry David Thoreau

Why wilderness? Because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.

Edward Abbey, Beyond the Wall

We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there.... We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.

Edward Abbey

What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.

Mahatma Gandhi

When we parcel heaven and fence eternity, when the wildness is all tamed and torn, don't let me live to see.

Connie Dover

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 Humphrey

What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left. O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

We need the tonic of wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.

Henry David Thoreau

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Henry David Thoreau