Wilderness Quotes - Page 16

• Bare heights of loneliness...a wilderness whose burning winds sweep over glowing sands, what are they to HIM? Even there He can refresh us, even there He can renew us.

  Amy Carmichael

  Loneliness, Glowing, Wind

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• He wanders, like a day-appearing dream, Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Dream, Ocean, Mind

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1840). “The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, p.321

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• You mustn't think of the Universe as a wilderness. It hasn't been that for billions of years," he said. "Think of it more as... ..cultivated.

  Carl Sagan

  Thinking, Years, Said

  Carl Sagan (1997). “Contact”, p.364, Simon and Schuster

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• There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, "He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance," and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker.

  Neil Gaiman

  Dog, Distance, Eye

  "Good Omens". Book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, 1990.

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• ...This is the first time I have met someone who seeks out people and who sees beyond. [...] We never look beyond our assumptions and, what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves. We don't recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were to become aware of the fact that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy. [...] As for me, I implore fate to give me the chance to see beyond myself and truly meet someone.

  Muriel Barbery

  Crazy, Fate, Mirrors

  "The Elegance of the Hedgehog". Book by Muriel Barbery, books.google.ru. September, 2 2013.

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• On the mountains mistakes are fatal. In politics, mistakes are wounding emotionally, but you recover. Personally, wilderness helps me get back in touch with natural rhythms, helps me reflect and, in the process, restore my creativity.

  Mark Udall

  Mistake, Creativity, Mountain

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• Communing with God is communing with our own hearts, our own best selves, not with something foreign and accidental. Saints and devotees have gone into the wilderness to find God; of course they took God with them, and the silence and detachment enabled them to hear the still, small voice of their own souls, as one hears the ticking of his own watch in the stillness of the night.

  John Burroughs

  Heart, Night, Self

  John Burroughs, Charlotte Zoë Walker (2001). “The Art of Seeing Things: Essays”, p.222, Syracuse University Press

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• In some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

  Joseph Conrad

  Regret, Hate, Heart

  Joseph Conrad (1999). “Heart of Darkness - Second Edition”, p.71, Broadview Press

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• We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.

  Marcel Proust

  Attitude, Struggle, Journey

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• We need wilderness preserved-as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds-because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.

  Wallace Stegner

  Character, People, Challenges

  Wallace Earle Stegner (2007). “The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner”, Counterpoint

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• That is how life goes--we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord's.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Children, Spring, Angel

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Gilead: A Novel”, p.119, Macmillan

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• The sweetest hunts are stolen. To steal a hunt, either go far into the wilderness where no one has been, or else find some undiscovered place under everybody's nose

  Aldo Leopold

  Noses, Stealing, Stolen

  Aldo Leopold (1968). “A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There”, p.57, Oxford University Press

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• Oh to have a lodge in some vast wilderness. Where rumors of oppression and deceit, of unsuccessful and successful wars may never reach me anymore.

  William Cowper

  War, Successful, Solitude

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• There is no domestic issue more important to America in the long run than the conservation and proper use of our natural resources, including fresh water, clean air, tillable soil, forests, wilderness, habitat for wildlife, minerals and recreational assets.

  Gaylord Nelson

  Running, Air, America

  Gaylord Nelson, Paul A. Wozniak, Susan M. Campbell (2002). “Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise”, p.164, Univ of Wisconsin Press

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• Wilderness has become one of the world's fastest disappearing resources, and it is non-renewable. Yet unlike oil, gold or woodchips, it is essential to the wellbeing of humanity. We are made of it and fashioned by it...our psychological beings resonate with it.

  Bob Brown

  Oil, Humanity, Gold

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• Eventually we realize that not knowing what to do is just as real and just as useful as knowing what to do. Not knowing stops us from taking false directions. Not knowing what to do, we start to pay real attention. Just as people lost in the wilderness, on a cliff face or in a blizzard pay attention with a kind of acuity that they would not have if they thought they knew where they were. Why? Because for those who are really lost, their life depends on paying real attention. If you think you know where you are, you stop looking.

  David Whyte

  Inspirational, Real, Thinking

  David Whyte (2009). “The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship”, p.88, Penguin

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• My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it's full complement of species, returning throughout the world.

  David Foreman

  Eugenics, Goal, Population

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• No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.

  Annie Dillard

  Land, Peaceful, Way

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• Let your tears fall because of sin; but, at the same time, let the eye of faith steadily behold the Son of man lifted up, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, that those who are bitten by the old serpent may look unto Jesus and live. Our sinnership is that emptiness into which the Lord pours his mercy.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Jesus, Fall, Eye

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• And that's when Anna realized that what the wolf had been asking Bran for was death. Impulsively, Anna stepped away from Charles. She put a knee on the bench she'd been sitting on and reached over the back to close her hand on Asil's wrist, which was lying across the back of the pew. He hissed in shock but didn't pull away. As she held him the scent of wilderness, of sickness, faded. He stared at her, the whites of his eyes showing brightly while his irises narrowed to small bands around his black pupil. "Omega," he whispered, his breath coming harshly.

  Patricia Briggs

  Lying, Eye, Hands

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• Perhaps the Wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silence that reminds us we live by grace.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Silence, Grace, Heartbeat

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• It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.

  Loren Eiseley

  Religious, Men, Vision

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• colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstacy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.

  Jack Kerouac

  Stars, School, Dark

  Jack Kerouac (1986). “The Dharma Bums”, p.39, Penguin

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• If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Heart, Men, Color

  Cormac McCarthy (2015). “Blood Meridian: Picador Classic”, p.145, Pan Macmillan

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• I am proud to be a Christian. I believe not only as a Christian, but as a scientist as well. A wireless device can deliver a message through the wilderness. In prayer the human spirit can send invisible waves to eternity, waves that achieve their goal in front of God.

  Guglielmo Marconi

  Christian, Prayer, Believe

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