The spiritual awakening and connectedness that comes with time spent outdoors is known by many. In fact, research is mounting on “nature prescriptions” for health. Some physicians even believe that time spent in nature could become the next vital sign.
Outdoors enthusiasts have known this for years, whether they’ve put it in medical terms or not. The following wilderness quotes reflect that knowledge and connection.
I know I’ve felt it, countless times. It arrives from time spent in nature, away from people, away from distractions, whether I’m actually seeking the insight and feeling of belonging or not. Nature brings it about.
I’ve felt it standing on the mountains. I’ve felt it sitting in a canoe on the lake. I’ve even felt it hunting thick, wet bogs. It’s the trees, the air, the animals – life.
The following wilderness quotes by different people over many years demonstrate how universal these feelings are. If you’re here reading this, I’m sure you’re aware of it too.
101 Wilderness Quotes
“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
– John Muir
“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity”
– John Muir
“There is a love of wild nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties”
– John Muir
“All the wilderness seems to be full of tricks and plans to drive and draw us up into God’s Light.”
– John Muir
“Nothing truly wild is unclean.”
– John Muir
“So abundant and novel are the objects of interest in a pure wilderness that unless you are pursuing special studies it matters little where you go, or how often to the same place. Wherever you chance to be always seems at the moment of all places the best; and you feel that there can be no happiness in this world or in any other for those who may not be happy here.”
– John Muir
“People are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home, that wilderness is a necessity.”
– John Muir
“Raindrops blossom brilliantly in the rainbow, and change to flowers in the sod, but snow comes in full flower direct from the dark, frozen sky.”
– John Muir
“I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.”
– Aldo Leopold
“All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”
– Aldo Leopold
“Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”
– Aldo Leopold
“Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing. I suppose some will wish to debate whether it is important to keep these primitive arts alive. I shall not debate it. Either you know it in your bones, or you are very, very old.”
– Aldo Leopold
“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
“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.”
– Chris Maser
“Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.”
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
“It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”
– Cheryl Strayed
“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed … We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”
– Wallace Stegner
“Wildness is the preservation of the World.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness – especially in the wilderness – you shall love him.”
– Frederick Buechner
“Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.”
– Jimmy Carter
“The sea is a desert of waves, A wilderness of water.”
– Langston Hughes
“The Wilderness holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask.”
– Nancy Newhall
“We had no choice. Sadness was a dangerous as panthers and bears. the wilderness needs your whole attention.”
– Laura Ingalls Wilder
“Love can be a land of wilderness, a wasteland of lost dreams in the backwoods of our muddled emotions, or it can be a heaven of ecstasy with an abundance of surrender, resplendent with acceptance and dependability.”
– Erik Pevernagie
“All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.”
“Some of us are drawn to mountains the way the moon draws the tide. Both the great forests and the mountains live in my bones. They have taught me, humbled me, purified me and changed me.”
– Joan Halifax
“Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.”
– Joseph Conrad
“Devoted though we must be to the conservation cause, I do not believe that any of us should give it all of our time or effort or heart. Give what you can, but do not burn yourselves out — or break your hearts. Let us save at least half of our lives for the enjoyment of this wonderful world which still exists. Leave your dens, abandon your cars and walk out into the great mountains, the deserts, the forests, the seashores. Those treasures still belong to all of us. Enjoy them to the full, stretch your legs, expand your lungs, enliven your hearts — and we will outlive the greedy swine who want to destroy it all in the name of what they call GROWTH. God bless America — let’s save some of it. Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet!”
– Edward Abbey
“I think it is far more important to save one square mile of wilderness, anywhere, by any means, than to produce another book on the subject.”
– Edward Abbey
“No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.”
– Edward Abbey
“A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be – will be – a human zoo. A high-tech slum.”
– Edward Abbey
“Any meal is a good meal when you’re on a good river.”
– Edward Abbey
“The old school of thought would have you believe that you’d be a fool to take on nature without arming yourself with every conceivable measure of safety and comfort under the sun. But that isn’t what being in nature is all about. Rather, it’s about feeling free, unbounded, shedding the distractions and barriers of our civilization—not bringing them with us.”
– Ryel Kestenbaum
“In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens — a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree — the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence — antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment.”
– Michael Pollan
“Unlike the majority of people, he did not hate or fear the wilderness; as harsh as the empty lands were, they possessed a grace and a beauty that no artifice could compete with and that he found restorative.”
– Christopher Paolini
“Our incredible bewilderment (wilderness separation) blinds us from seeing that our many personal and global problems primarily result from our assault of and separation from the natural creation process within and around us. Our estrangement from nature leaves us wanting, and when we want there is never enough. Our insatiable wanting is called greed. It is a major source of our destructive dependencies and violence.”
– Michael J. Cohen
“This is not wilderness for designation or for a park. Not a scenic wilderness and not one good for fishing or the viewing of wildlife. It is wilderness that gets into your nostrils, that runs with your sweat. It is the core of everything living, wilderness like molten iron.”
– Craig Childs
“In the presence of the storm, thunderbolts, hurricane, rain, darkness, and the lions, which might be concealed but a few paces away, he felt disarmed and helpless.”
– Henryk Sienkiewicz
“And we were taught to play golf. Golf epitomizes the tame world. On a golf course nature is neutered. The grass is clean, a lawn laundry that wipes away the mud, the insect, the bramble, nettle and thistle, an Eezy-wipe lawn where nothing of life, dirty and glorious, remains. Golf turns outdoors into indoors, a prefab mat of stultified grass, processed, pesticided, herbicided, the pseudo-green of formica sterility. Here, the grass is not singing. The wind cannot blow through it. Dumb expression, greenery made stupid, it hums a bland monotone in the key of the mono-minded. No word is emptier than a golf tee. No roots, it has no known etymology, it is verbal nail polish. Worldwide, golf is an arch act of enclosure, a commons fenced and subdued for the wealthy, trampling serf and seedling. The enemy of wildness, it is a demonstration of the absolute dominion of man over wild nature.”
– Jay Griffiths
“Now, wilderness can be seen as a useful fiction, a fiction constructed by John Muir and his heirs and deployed to keep places from being destroyed by resource extraction and wholesale development.”
– Rebecca Solnit
“It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger.”
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh
“Whenever we encounter wild animals in nature, we must only ever show kindness and compassion.”
– Paul Oxton
“There may be days when I can’t help an animal in need, but the day will never come that I won’t try.”
– Paul Oxton
“Wilderness, or wildness is a mystique. A religion, an intense philosophy, a dream of ideal society – these are also mystique. We are not engaged in preserving so many acre-feet of water, so many board-feet of timber, so many billion tons of granite, so many profit possibilities in so many ways for those concerned with the material aspects of the world. Yet, we must accept the fact that human life (at least in the metabolic sense) depends upon the resources of the Earth. As the fisherman depends upon the rivers, lakes and seas, and the farmer upon the land for his existence, so does mankind in general depend upon the beauty of the world about him for his spiritual and emotional existence.
– Ansel Adams
“Wild beach is my primordial address.”
– Talismanist Giebra
“Faeries are known to be tenders of plants and energizing inhabitants of gardens. They are more elusive than Angels and often have lively, mercurial temperaments. They are active in preserving what little wilderness remains on the Earth.”
– Elizabeth Eiler
“We made our way to the very edge of the cliff and looked down. We could hear the water dashing, splashing and roaring as if angry at the small space through which it was forced to pass.”
– Sallie Hester
“The forest, far from the mundane and familiar world of the city, provides the appropriate setting for exceptional figures, both holy and mythic. Here, as in the world landscapes, figures and settings are truly matched; and as Reindert Falkenburg and myself have argued, the remoteness and grand scale of the forest or the earlier mountain wilderness signal the sanctity of or gravity of the human scene, however small in scale, which the discerning viewer must seek out and read as significant.”
– Larry Silver
“This was true mountain country, now, and true wilderness. Valley meadows, leafy trees halfway up the slopes, then evergreens gradually taking over at the higher altitudes… their road wound its way up and down through tree-tunnels that only intermittently allowed them to see the sky. It would have been a lovely journey under other circumstances. The weather remained fair, and remarkably pleasant, even if the night was going to be cold. She had only read about the wilderness, never experienced it for herself, and she found herself liking it a lot. Or- parts of it, anyway. The way it was never entirely silent, but simply ‘quiet’- birdsong and insect noises, the rustle of leaves, the distant sound of water. She had never before realized how noisy people were. And the forest was so beautiful. She wasn’t at all used to deep forest; it was like being inside a living cathedral, with beams of light penetrating the tree-canopy and illuminating unexpected treasures, a moss-covered rock, a small cluster of flowers, a spray of ferns. These woods were ‘old’, too, the trees had trunks so big it would take three people to put their arms around them, and there was a scent to the place that somehow conveyed that centuries of leaves had fallen here and become earth.”
– Mercedes Lackey
“Onward and upward he pushed until rock, ground, and forest came to an end, until there was nothing but a sharp edge of blunt earth protruding in the late light of the range, where he could see well beyond the park boundaries to national forest land that he had once scouted on foot and horseback. He remembered it then as roadless, the only trails being those hacked by Indians and prospectors. He had taken notes on the flora and fauna, commented on the age of the bristlecone pine trees at the highest elevations, the scrub oak in the valleys, the condors overhead, the trout in alpine tarns. He had lassoed that wild land in ink, returned to Washington, and sent the sketch to the president, who preserved it for posterity. What did Michelangelo feel at the end of his life, staring at a ceiling in the Vatican or a marble figure in Florence? Pinchot knew. And those who followed him, his great-great-grandchildren, Teddy’s great-great-grandchildren, people living in a nation one day of five hundred million people, could find their niche as well. Pinchot felt God in his soul, and thanked him, and weariness in his bones. He sensed he had come full circle.”
– Timothy Egan
“We never fell ill, not once during one year in the U.S. national parks–perhaps proof of the therapeutic properties of our natural world.”
– Stefanie Payne
“It looks a bit like the inside of a cave that has been turned inside out and warmed by the sun.”
– Stefanie Payne
“If you have ever wanted to visit somewhere completely wild – away from services, roads, people, and all signs of humanity – head to Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, one of Earth’s last true wilderness places.”
– Stefanie Payne
“It is there from the moment I smell the tussock, the forest, the heat of the sun on rocks. And it’s there in the smell of blood, sweat and mud ingrained in my jersey as I fall asleep using it as a pillow in a mountain hut, under a heaven studded with glittering stars.”
– Richard Hall
“If people start paying attention to the organisms that are thriving, unseen, among us, I think it will change us for the better: On the political scale, we’ll become more realistic and effective in our efforts to protect the environment; on the personal scale, we’ll be happier and more full of wonder.”
– Nathanael Johnson
“People don’t want you to fix them, they just want you to let them evolve into a beautiful wilderness of contradictions.”
– Curtis Tyrone Jones
“A visiting scientist tell of Africa’s disappearing wilderness: More than two-thirds of its wildlife had already been eliminated, pushed out of its habitats by large ranches and urban sprawl. In the southern regions, thousands of predators were being trapped, shot, snared, and poisoned to protect domestic stock. In some African nations, conservation policies and practices were virtually nonexistent.”
– Mark Owens
“Some of the most memorable, and least regrettable, nights of my own youth were spent in coon hunting with farmers. There is no denying that these activities contributed to the economy of farm households, but a further fact is that they were pleasures; they were wilderness pleasures, not greatly different from the pleasures pursued by conservationists and wilderness lovers. As I was always aware, my friends the coon hunters were not motivated just by the wish to tree coons and listen to hounds and listen to each other, all of which were sufficiently attractive; they were coon hunters also because they wanted to be afoot in the woods at night. Most of the farmers I have known, and certainly the most interesting ones, have had the capacity to ramble about outdoors for the mere happiness of it, alert to the doings of the creatures, amused by the sight of a fox catching grasshoppers, or by the puzzle of wild tracks in the snow.”
– Wendell Berry
“Amid the stillness of the night, in the depths of the ravine, from the direction in which the corpses lay suddenly resounded a kind of inhuman, frightful laughter in which quivered despair, and joy, and cruelty, and suffering, and pain, and sobbing, and derision; the heart-rending and spasmodic laughter of the insane or condemned.”
– Henryk Sienkiewicz
“There, about a dozen times during the day, the wind drives over the sky the swollen clouds, which water the earth copiously, after which the sun shines brightly, as if freshly bathed, and floods with a golden luster the rocks, the river, the trees, and the entire jungle.”
– Henryk Sienkiewicz
“Wilderness begins with disconnections. It continues with deceit”
– Max Lucado
“Amid the coal-fired fug of industrialism, people began to recognize that the unchecked spread of civilization could be toxic, and the wilderness, by comparison, came to represent cleanliness and health. Quite suddenly, the symbolic polarity of the word wilderness was reversed: it went from being wicked to being holy.”
– Robert Moor
“I came to realize that my path to knowledge would not lead me to libraries, professors, universities, and studies. My path to knowledge was through living life and experiencing reality. I could learn plenty secondhand, but nothing was ever to surpass the experiences I had in the wilderness. All my knowledge of social, scientific, and religious issues has been acquired through personal experience.”
– Reinhold Messner
“I’m primarily concerned with what happens inside a person when they encounter the mountains. When you climb a mountain, you come back down as a different person. We don’t change the mountain by climbing it; we ourselves change.”
– Reinhold Messner
“There’s much more behind our thirst for monsters than curiosity or escapism. There is fear that the earth is losing the last regions where myth can flourish.”
– Reinhold Messner
“The warrior receives training in the wilderness.”
– Lailah Gifty Akita
“In the wilderness, many were made to wander.”
– Lailah Gifty Akita
“We have no choice but wonder in the wilderness.” –
– Lailah Gifty Akita
“Wilderness is the void that we fill with paradise or prison, heaven or hell. A valley we can flow through or struggle against. Maybe one day I would learn how to live in the in-between place called home.”
– Heather Durham
“Every man should wake up alone and spend thirty minutes outside. He should spend thirty minutes with the rising sun listening for birds while pacing back and forth in ponderous thought, with a cool breeze on his nose and his arms stretched into the open air. He should spend thirty minutes alone with whatever view is available. Then he should go back to sleep.”
– Daniel J. Rice
“It has always been my belief that you can judge the compatibility of two people by the rhythm of their paddle stroke.”
– Daniel J. Rice
“tis greater far To rule a people than a wilderness.”
– Sophocles
“I keep turning around to feel the embrace of these sweeping valley. First thoughts: Never have I felt so safe. No development. No distractions. Nothing to break my heart. I was not prepared for this uninterrupted peace.”
– Terry Tempest Williams
“Wolves howl in the bright light of the moon. Bison remain wild, not tamed. And on dark days, when everywhere we turn war is raging and violence around the world seems to be rising, a dozen trumpeter swans fly in formation over snow-covered peaks.”
– Terry Tempest Williams
“We are bathed in light, endless light, sometimes volatile, ever changing. We watch weather as one watches fire.”
– Terry Tempest Williams
“Despite all this, the wilderness calls to me more strongly with each passing year. Those distant mountains, always lingering in my peripheral vision, and the ancient forests. Immortal lungs of the earth.”
– Dekka Nye
“Wilderness is source of Happiness..”
– Kedar dhepe
“He was deeply susceptible, moreover, to that singular spell which the wilderness lays upon certain lonely natures, and he loved the wild solitudes with a kind of romantic passion that amounted almost to an obsession. The life of the backwoods fascinated him—whence, doubtless, his surpassing efficiency in dealing with their mysteries”
– Algernon Blackwood
“That sometimes when you’re out in the world – he meant the mountains, the forests; he’d always lived here- you recognize the other parts of your soul”
– Zoje Stage
“And we will meet in the woods far far away from this hustle and bustle… and share love and sunshine.”
– Avijeet Das
“You can take a cub from the savannah as they have, and raise it like a pet if you like. In a cage, as some do, or running free like Paddy. You can feed it fresh meat so it never learns to hunt and brush its coat so it carries a human smell wherever it goes—but know that what you’ve done is twist something natural into something else. And you can never trust on unnatural thing.
– Charles Clutterbuck” Paula McLain
“I imagined the wind moving through all these places, and many more like them: places that were separated from one another by roads and housing, fences and shopping-centres, street-lights and cities, but that were joined across space at that time by their wildness in the wind. We are fallen in mostly broken pieces, I thought, but the wild can still return us to ourselves.”
– Robert Macfarlane
“Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction – so easy to lapse into – that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.”
– Robert MacFarlane
“I had known him for fewer than four years, but friendship with Roger did not seem to follow the normal laws of time. ‘I want all my friends to come up like weeds,’ he had once written in a notebook, ‘and I want to be a weed myself, spontaneous and unstoppable. I don’t want the kind of friends one has to cultivate.’ That caught it exactly. Spontaneous and unstoppable. Roger had not just loved the wild, he had been the wild. Not in the austere and chastening sense I had once understood the wild to be, but natural, vigorous, like a tree or a river.”
– Robert Macfarlane
“Unmistakably, the wild land of the Lake District acted for good upon Coleridge. As he moved between the crags and cataracts, over the fells and the moors, and through the pathless wilds, a sense of joy – joy, the ‘beautiful and beauty-making power’ as he had longingly called it during the dark spring of 1802 – began to seep back into him. Walking over soft mossy ground on the slopes of Red Pike – ‘a dolphin-shaped Peak of a deep red’ that rises to the south-west of Buttermere – he gave ‘many a hop, skip, & jump’. Up on the mountains that year, he found not the ‘Darkness & Dimness & a bewildering Shame, and Pain that is utterly Lord over us’ which had characterised his depression, but instead, a ‘fantastic Pleasure, that draws the Soul along swimming through the air in many shapes, even as a Flight of Starlings in a Wind!”
– Robert Macfarlane
“On the north-western coasts of Britain and Ireland, the air has a remarkable transparency, for it is almost free of particulate matter. Little loose dust rises from the wet land, and the winds blow prevailingly off the sea. Through such air, photons can proceed without obstacle. The light moves, unscattered, and falls upon the forms and objects of those regions with candour. Standing within such a light, you feel thankful for its openness. There is a sense of something having been freely given, without its store having been diminished.”
– Robert Macfarlane
“Swarms of bees, beetles, soft music of the world, a gentle humming; brent geese, barnacle geese, shortly before All Hallows, music of the dark wild torrent.
– Robert Macfarlane
“I could not now say when I first grew to love the wild, only that I did, and that a need for it will always remain strong in me. As a child, whenever I read the word, it conjured images of wide spaces, remote and figureless. Isolated islands off Atlantic coasts. Unbounded forests, and blue snow-light falling on to drifts marked with the paw-prints of wolves. Frost-shattered summits and corries holding lochs of great depth. And this was the vision of a wild place that had stayed with me: somewhere boreal, wintry, vast, isolated, elemental, demanding of the traveller in its asperities. To reach a wild place was, for me, to step outside human history.”
– Robert Macfarlane
“On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world. The blinding of the stars is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefits that it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world.”
– Robert Macfarlane
“I had woken into a metal world. The smooth unflawed slopes of snow on the mountain across the valley were iron. The deeper moonshadows had a tinge of steel blue to them. Otherwise, there was no true colour. Everything was greys, black, sharp silver-white. Inclined sheets of ice gleamed like tin. The hailstones lay about like shot, millions of them, grouped up against each rock and clustered in snow hollows. The air smelt of minerals and frost.”
– Robert Macfarlane
“As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.”
– Robert Macfarlane
“His only solace came in following the peregrines. Hunting as haunting. Out in the fields, he was brought closer to wildness: he could step through the looking-glass and into the beyond-world. Out there, he was also able to forget the fact that he himself was ill.”
– Robert Macfarlane
“A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth. It is a quality of one’s own consciousness. The planet is a wild place and will always be.”
– Gary Snyder
“I sat amongst the bones for a while and watched the ocean as it churned, thinking that Africa was the most wild and devastatingly beautiful place that I would ever have the privilege of knowing.”
– Bianca Bowers
“There is peace in wilderness, winter nights luminescent, with the silent falling of snow.”
– Meeta Ahluwalia
“I was one of the many millions to misunderstand what is wild. I have read authors’ definitions of “wild” as any place you can walk for a week without meeting a road or fence. But I think that is a narrow view, a consumer view, a transactional perspective that expects a landscape to give us the sense of wilderness in return for our travel. It is one I subscribed to for many years, which is partly why I found myself in those places, but now I see it as lazy. A sense of wild is engendered by awareness, a sense of connection with and deep understanding of any landscape. The pavement of any city side street wriggles with enough life to terrify and delight us if we choose to immerse ourselves in it”
– Tristan Gooley
“I was one of the many millions to misunderstand what is wild. I have read authors’ definitions of “wild” as any place you can walk for a week witthout meeting a road or fence. But I think that is a narrow view, a consumer view, a transactional perspective that expects a landscape to give us the sense of wilderness in return for our travel. It is one I subscribed to for many years, which is partly why I found myself in those places, but now I see it as lazy. A sense of wild is engendered by awareness, a sense of connection with and deep understanding of any landscape. The pavement of any city side street wriggles with enough life to terrify and delight us if we choose to immerse ourselves in it”
– Tristan Gooley
“My battle with the forest depths was wholly lost, or so it seemed. My hand still shakes with the thought of how close I came to dying, for I felt the burning coldness of Death’s breath upon my face, and the whisper of sliding bones in my ear. But alas, I am still among the living, or so I believe.”
– Christopher C. Fuchs
“England sinks, the waters rise, but exile is not all about weeping by the rivers. There are also insights in the wilderness.”
– Cliff James
“God has given us the Spirit of boldness, so that even in the wilderness, we can be dauntless.”
– Gift Gugu Mona
“Thus, he walks and walks in his wilderness, a futile, foolish trek made not in order to arrive somewhere but simply and solely in order to be one of those who walk in the wilderness. And this work of his is a life sentence.”
– Knut Hamsun
Is your favorite wilderness quote missing from the list? Add it to the comments section below.