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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Henry David Thoreau3 quotes
Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure. — Henry David Thoreau · 1851In Wildness is the preservation of the World. — Henry David Thoreau · 1851I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. — Henry David Thoreau · 1851John Muir2 quotes
In God's wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. — John Muir · 1890All the wilderness seems to be full of tricks and plans to drive and draw us up into God's light. — John Muir · 1869Edward Abbey1 quote
Why this cult of wilderness?... Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever that means; re-creation for the soul, whatever that is; escape; novelty, the delight of something different; truth and understanding and wisdom-commendable virtues in any man, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present-all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as "Why wilderness?" To which, nevertheless, I shall append one further answer anyway: because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger. — Edward Abbey · 1971Freya Stark1 quote
The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence-free of the network of dead speech. — Freya Stark · 1948Gerard Manley Hopkins1 quote
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wilderness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. — Gerard Manley Hopkins · 1918John Clare1 quote
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator God
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below, above, the vaulted sky. — John Clare · 1848Terry Tempest Williams1 quote
If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. — Terry Tempest Williams · 1955Wallace Stegner1 quote
These are some of the things wilderness can do for us. That is the reason we need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles of exploitation or "usefulness" or even recreation. We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope. — Wallace Stegner · 1960