Favorite Wilderness Quotes

Lake Superior beach in the summer. (Notice the huge crowds)

Equipment: Nikkormat 35mm F=50mm lense.

Photo digitally enhanced to black & white.

*

QUOTES
*

"Keep close to nature's heart, yourself; and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean..."

--John Muir

------

"I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."
--John Muir

------

"….there is nothing like a wilderness journey for rekindling the fires of life. Simplicity is part of it. Cutting the cackle. Transportation reduced to leg – or arm – power, eating irons to one spoon. Such simplicity, together with sweat and silence, amplify the rhythms of any long journey, especially through unknown, untattered territory. And in the end such a journey can restore an understanding of how insignificant you are, and thereby set you free."
-- Colin Fletcher from "River"

------

"Lakes gleaming like eyes, and silvery embroidery of rivers and creeks watering and brightening all the vast glad wilderness."
--John Muir

------

"People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully. Looking out on a clean plank of planet earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own."
--- Barbara Kingsolver

-----

"The wilderness is a place of rest -- not in the sense of being motionless, for the lure, after all, is to move, to round the next bend. The rest comes in the isolation from distractions, in the slowing of the daily centrifugal forces that keep us off balance."
--David Douglas, from "Wilderness Sojourn"

------

...How interesting everything is! Every rock, mountain, stream, plant, lake, lawn, forest, garden, bird, beast, insect seems to call and invite us to come and learn something of its history and relationship....No other place has ever so overwhelmingly attracted me as this hospitable, Godful wilderness."

--unknown