Quotes from Literati
Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt. (Anonymous)
Why wilderness? Because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.
--Edward Abbey in Beyond the WallOf all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt. (Anonymous)
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed. --Wallace Stegner Wilderness is "the very stuff America is made of.
Aldo Leopold Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
--Raph Waldo Emerson
I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed Against the earth's sweet flowing breast ... Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree. -- Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) American poet
He that plants trees loves others beside himself. --English proverb--
Away, away from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs -- To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music. --Percy Bysshe Shelley
If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt....we must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it. President Lyndon B. Johnson, upon signing the Wilderness Act, 1964
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
In God's wilderness lies the hope of the world -- the great fresh, un-blighted, unredeemed wilderness, the galling harness of civilization drops off, and the wounds heal before we are aware. -- John Muir
He who plants a tree Plants a hope. --Lucy Larcom (1826-1893) American poet
In wilderness is the preservation of the world.... 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 infinitely wild, unsurveyed, and unfathomed by us... We can never have enough of nature. --Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) American philosopher, writer, and naturalist
The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time. --Henry David Thoreau
It's not easy being green. --Kermit the Frog
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, Dream, and so dream all night without a stir .... --John Keats (1795-1821) English poet
I remember, I remember, The fir trees dark and high. --Thomas Hood (1799-1845) English poet
As the leaves of the trees are said to absorb all noxious qualities of the air, and to breathe forth a purer atmosphere, so it seems to me as if they drew from us all sordid and angry passions, and breathed forth peace and philanthropy. There is a severe and settled majesty in woodland scenery that enters into the soul, and dilates and elevates it, and fills it with noble inclinations. --Washington Irving (1783-1859) American writer
What does he plant who plants a tree? He plants the friend of sun and sky; He plants the flag of breezes free; The shaft of beauty, towering high; He plants a home to heaven on high For song and mother-croon of bird in hushed and happy twilight heard - The treble of heaven's harmony - These things he plants who plants a tree. --Henry Cuyler Bunner (1855-1896)
American writer How still it is here in the woods. The trees Stand motionless, as if they do not dare To stir, lest it should break the spell. The air Hangs quiet as spaces in a marble frieze. Even this little brook, that runs at ease, Whispering and gurgling in its knotted bed, Seems but to deepen with its curling thread Of sound the shadowy sun-pierced silences. --Archibald Lampman (1861-1899) Canadian poet
...branches float on the wind more than they yield to it; and in their tossing do not so much bend under a force, as rise on a wave, which penetrates in liquid threads through all their sprays. --John Ruskin (1819-1900) English writer and critic
That delicate forest flower, With scented breath and look so like a smile, Seems, as it issues from the shapeless mould, An emanation of the indwelling Life, A visible token of the upholding Love, That are the soul of this great universe. --William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) American poet
Deep in earth's opaque mirror, The old oak's roots Reflected its branches, Astrologers in reverse, Keen-eyed miners Conned their scintillant gems. --Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) American poet
One summer afternoon, you find Some lonely trees. Persuade your mind To drowse. Then, as your eyelids close, And you still hover into those Three stages of a darkening doze, This side the barrier of sleep, Pause. In this last clear moment open quick Your sight toward where the green is bright and thick. Be sure that everything you keep To dream with is made out of trees. --Harold Munro (1879-1932) English writer
The trees throw up their singing leaves, and climb Spray over spray. They break through time. Their roots lash through the clay. They lave The earth, and wash along the ground; They burst in green wave over wave, Fly in a blossom of light foam; Rank following windy rank they come: They flood the plain, Swill through the valley, top the mound, Flow over the low hill, Curl round The bases of the mountains, fill Their crevices, and stain Their ridges green.... --Harold Munro (1879-1932) English writer
To the edge of the wood I am drawn, I am drawn. --Sidney Lanier (1842-1881) American poet
In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me. --John Fowles (1926- ) English writer
It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit. --Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish writer
Let me stand in the heart of a beech tree, with great boughs all sinewed and whorled about me. And just for a moment catch a glimpse of primeval time that breathes forgotten within this busy hurrying world. --Stephanie June Sorrell (1956- ) English poet
We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorous and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours. --Marcel Proust (1871-1922) French novelist
Like two cathedral towers these stately pines Uplift their fretted summits tipped with cones; The arch beneath them is not built with stones, Not Art but Nature traced these lovely lines,... Enter! the pavement, carpeted with leaves, Gives back a softened echo to thy tread! Listen! the choir is singing; all the birds, In leafy galleries beneath the eaves, Are singing! listen, ere the sound be fled, And learn there may be worship without words. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1870-1882) American poet
One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good Than all the sages can. --William Wordsworth (1770-1850) English poet
Forest could keep secrets Forest could keep secrets Forest tune in everyday To watersound and birdsong Forest letting her hair down To the teeming creeping of her forest ground But forest don't broadcast her business No forest cover her business down From sky and fast-eye sun And when night come And darkness wrap her like a gown Forest is a bad dream woman Forest dreaming about mountain And when earth was young Forest dreaming of the caress of gold Forest roots sing with mysterious eldorado And when howler monkey Wake her up with howl Forest just stretch and stir To a new day of sound But coming back to secrets Forest could keep secrets Forest could keep secrets And we must keep forest. --Grace Nichols (1950- ) Guyanese writer
I want to head into the woods with my hands open. I want to look down into a canyon dusted in white With birch trees rising among the pine Like plumed arrows shot from the ridge. I want to live on the river and hear ice coming. I want to slow into the hollows of logs, smell The cold woods, bark and glacier. I want to hear Storms shake sound from the sky, let it boom around me! I want to hear the trees speak of snow While I stand in my doorway, listening. --Nancy Cheery (1955- ) American poet
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me? --Walt Whitman (1819-1892) American poet
In the country it is as if every tree said to me, "Holy! Holy!" Who can ever express the ecstasy of the woods? --Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) German composer
I robbed the Woods - The trusting Woods. The unsuspecting Trees Brought out their Burrs and mosses My fantasy to please. I scanned their trinkets curious - I gasped - I bore away - What will the solemn Hemlock - What will the Oak tree say? --Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) American poet
(Above Excerpts from The Forests: A Celebration of Nature, in Word and Image compiled by Michelle Lovric for Courage Books, Philadelphia, 1996.)
If you would measure the quiet majesty, the beauty, the sanctity of the woods, do it with a two-foot rule. Automobiles, snowmobiles, trail bikes, ATVs or whatever, will get you to the woods and through the woods, but to be a PART of the great sanctuary -- walk. And when you walk, observe, and think. Look thoughtfully at all of the things about you. Ponder over them. They are beautiful, silent. And above all things on earth, they are honest. And they are at peace. Let them remind you that you owe your allegiance not to you and your kind, but to them and their kind, for they are nature. -- Unknown
One learns to make-do. One learns to make the best of very little. I use sticks to hold my hair bun together, large smooth leaves for toilet paper, baking soda for deodorant and tooth paste; and glowing candlelight in place of electricity. I actually SEW my underwear...mend the elastic, patch my pants, darn my socks. Nothing is thrown away. Even when my clothes literally fall off me, I recycle it and use it as rags. My washing machine is a stream and my dryer the sun, as my clothes hang on the back of my pack. I can learn to make-do and do without nearly everything, except people. People who care and love me. People I can hug. --Cindy Ross from her A Woman's Journey on the Appalachian Trail
There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. -Aldo Leopold from A Sand County Almanac
The key to intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts. --Aldo Leopold
Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountains. Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike. The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest of wilderness. Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul. When one tugs at a single thing in nature...he finds it attached to the rest of the world. --John Muir
There is a delight in the hardy life of the open. There are no words that can tell of the hidden spirit of the wilderness that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm. The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value. --Theodore Roosevelt
Beyond the wall of the unreal city, beyond the security fences topped with barbed wire and razor wire, beyond the asphalt beltings of the superhighways, beyond the cemented banksides of our temporarily stopped and mutilated rivers, beyond the lies that poison the air, there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then -- may your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night. --Edward Abbey (from "Beyond the Wall")
If a man walk in the woods for the love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forest but to cut them down! --Henry David Thoreau
Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from the masters. --Saint Bernard
The world is not to be put in order; the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order. --Henry Miller
I'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth. --Steve McQueen (actor)
To those who have entered them, the mountains reveal beauties they will not disclose to those who make no effort. This is the reward mountains give to effort. And it is because they have so much to give and give it so lavishly to those who enter them that we learn to love the mountains and go back to them again and again. The mountains reserve their choice gifts for those who journey into them and stand upon their summits. --Sir Francis Youngblood
Did you know that trees talk? Well, they do. They talk to each other, and they'll talk to you if you listen. Trouble is, white people don't listen. They never learned to listen to the Indians so I don't suppose they'll listen to other voices in nature. But I have learned a lot from trees: sometimes about the weather, sometimes about animals, sometimes about the Great Spirit. --and-- Hills are always more beautiful than stone buildings, you know. Living in a city is an artificial existence. Lots of people hardly ever feel real soil under their feet, see plants grow except in flower pots, or get far enough beyond the street light to catch the enchantment of a night sky studded with stars. When people live far from the scenes of the Great Spirit's making, it's easy for them to forget his laws. --Tatanga Mani (Walking Buffalo)
We use the word wilderness, but perhaps we mean wildness. Isn't that why I've come here? In wilderness I seek the wildness in myself and in so doing come on the wildness everywhere around me. Because, after all, being part of nature I'm cut from the same cloth. --Gretel Ehrlich (from "Waterfall")
No pain here...no fear of the past, no fear of the future...no petty personal hope or experience has room to be.... --and-- The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. --and-- Coming down from the mountains to men, I always feel a man out of place; as from sunlight to mere gas and dust, and am always glad to touch the living rock again and dip my head in high mountain pleasures. --all from John Muir
Within you now are divine ideas for caring for our Earth and our global family....You have everything it takes to make a difference! We are one, after all, you and I. --Teilhard de Chardin
The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild: and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. --Henry David Thoreau ("Reform Papers")
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. --and-- The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me and I to them. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not for every man's greed. --Mahatma Gandhi
How many wilderness areas do we need? How many Brahms symphonies do we need? --Robert Marshall
Do you flood the Sistine Chapel so that the tourists can get closer to the ceiling? --David Brower
The Majority already has its roads and hotels. Only a small minority enjoy art galleries, libraries, and universities. Yet no one would suggest making these facilities into bowling alleys, circuses, or hot dog stands just because more people would use them. Quality has a claim as well as quantity. --Robert Marshall
If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again. If you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk. and I go to my solitary woodland walks as the homesick return to their homes. and I have never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. --all by Henry David Thoreau
In solitude alone can man know true freedom. --Montaigne
Wilderness complements and completes civilization. I might say that the existence of wilderness is also a compliment to civilization. And society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization. and Wilderness can be defined as a place where humans enjoy the opportunity of being attacked by a wild animal. --Edward Abbey Thousands of tired. nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers but as fountain of life. --John Muir There's a song in the canyon below me And a song in the pines overhead, As the sunlight crawls down from the snowline And rustles the deer from his bed. With mountains of green all around me And mountains of white up above And mountains of blue down the ski-line, I follow the trail that I love. --Charles Badger Clark (1883-1957) -- poet laureate of South Dakota
You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know. --Rene Daumal
More by Edward Abbey:
- The plow has probably done more harm -- in the long run -- than the sword.
- The most common form of terrorism in the USA is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws. * Concrete is heavy, iron is hard -- but the grass will prevail.
- Wilderness begins in the human mind.
- One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.
- Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind.
- When a man's best friend is his dog, the dog has a problem.
- When wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.
- I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving.
- The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.
We need wilderness because we are wild animals. Every man needs a place where he can go crazy in peace. The task before you is never as great as the power behind you. --Unknown
The less there is between you and the environment, the more you appreciate the environment. --Colin Fletcher
The wild places are where we began. When they end, so do we. and A world without wilderness is a cave. --David Brower
The greatest joy in nature is the absence of man. --Bliss Carman
Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. --Also Leopold
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. --Albert Einstein
When you are close to nature you can listen to the voice of God. --Herman Hesse
Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do. --Michel De Montaigne
Not to have known -- as most men have not -- either mountain or the desert, is not to have known one's self. --Joseph Wood Krutch
Heaven is under our feet, as well as over our heads. --Henry David Thoreau
Nature never did betray the heart that loved her. --William Wordsworth
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. --Willa Cather
Solitude means altitude and thin air.... It's the way we distance ourselves from human activity- to climb to the top of the mountain.... So many things with a wild heart operate in this way. -- Rick Bass
Wildness is a civilization other than our own. -- Henry David Thoreau
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the last 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
Wilderness can be defined as a place where humans enjoy the opportunity of being attacked by a wild animal. --Edward Abbey
While God's glory is written all over His work, in wilderness the letters are capitalized. -- John Muir
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. --Mohandas Ghandi
The woods are made for the hunters of dreams, the brooks for the fishers of song. To the hunters who hunt for the gunless game, the streams and the woods belong. -- Sam Walter Foss
Life is a fatal adventure. It can have only one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible? --Alexander Eliot
To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light. Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Hiking a ridge, a meadow, or a river bottom, is as healthy a form of exercise as one can get. Hiking seems to put all the body cells back into rhythm. Ten to twenty miles on a trail puts one to bed with his cares unraveled. Hiking - and climbing, too - are man's most natural exercises. They introduce him again to the wonder's of nature and teach him the beauty of the woods and fields in winter as well as in spring. They also teach him how to take care of himself and his neighbors in times of adversity. We need exercise as individuals. We need to keep physically fit and alert as people...history is the sound of heavy boots going upstairs and the rustle of satin slippers coming down. Nations that are soft and sleek - people who get all their exercise and athletics vicariously - will not survive when the competition is severe and adversity is at hand. It is imperative that America stay fit. For today, we face as great a danger, as fearsome a risk, as any people in history. --William O. Douglas, Justice, United States Supreme Court
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 it. --William O. Douglas, Justice, United States Supreme Court. from Earth Apples: The Poetry of Edward Abbey
Benedictio: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing views. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottoes of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you –beyond the next turning of the canyon walls. So long.
Some of the above excerpts can be found in Lora Davis's wonderful guide book, Hiking Trails in the Collegiate Peaks Wilderness Area, Pruett Publishing Company, Boulder, Colorado, 1994.
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