12 Quotes Tagged: Wilderness

I love the wild not less than the good.

It is surprising with what impunity and comfort one who has always lain in a warm bed in a close apartment, and studiously avoided drafts of air, can lie down on the ground without a shelter, roll himself in a blanket, and sleep before a fire, in a frosty, autumn night, just after a long rain-storm, and even come soon to enjoy and value the fresh air.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.

What's the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty.

I've done my research and learned this : Ten is when we learn how to be good girls and real boys.Ten is when children begin to hide who they are in order to become what the world expects them to be.Right around ten is when we begin to internalize our formal taming.Ten is when the world sat me down, told me to be quiet, and pointed toward my cages: These are the feelings you are allowed to express.This is how a woman should act.This is the body you must strive for.These are the things you will believe.These are the people you can love.Those are the people you should fear.This is the kind of life you are supposed to want.Make yourself fit.You'll be uncomfortable at first, but don't worry-eventually you'll forget you're caged.Soon this will just feel like: life.

I would rather hear a single shrub oak leaf at the end of a wintry glade rustle of its own accord at my approach, than receive a shipload of stars and garters from the strange kings and peoples of the earth.

We soon get through with Nature. She excites an expectation which she cannot satisfy. The merest child which has rambled into a copsewood dreams of a wilderness so wild and strange and inexhaustible as Nature can never show him.

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences. Serpents, bears, hyenas, tigers, rapidly vanish as civilization advances, but the most populous and civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves.

In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

If you have ever done any work with these finest tools, the imagination and fancy and reason, it is a new creation, independent on the world, and a possession forever. You have laid up something against a rainy day. You have to that extent cleared the wilderness.

This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort, or boneset, to my intellect. This is what I go out to seek. It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible, companion, and walked with him.