Wilderness Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old wilderness quotes, wilderness sayings, and wilderness proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

In big wilderness, you learn how important size itself is to the viability of the wilderness. It needs enough buffer to keep its heartland essentially free from the pervasive influences of technology. Such big wilderness is scarce, and is vanishing at a rate of about a million acres a year, chiefly to the chainsaw. People who know it can save it. No one else. David Brower
In God's wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh, unlighted, unredeemed wilderness. John Muir
There is magic in the feel of a paddle and the movement of a canoe, a magic compounded of distance, adventure, solitude and peace. The way of a canoe is the way of the wilderness and of a freedom almost forgotten. It is an antidote to insecurity, the open door to waterways of ages past and a way of life with profound and abiding satisfactions. Sigurd Olson
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. Henry David Thoreau
There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm. Theodore Roosevelt
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed. Wallace Stegner
God made the wilderness for man and all other creatures to use, to adore, but not to destroy. William O. Douglas
Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Henry David Thoreau
There is no wilderness so terrible, so beautiful, so arid, so fruitful, as the wilderness of compassion. It is the only desert that shall truly flourish like a lily. Thomas Merton
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness. Henry Havelock Ellis
The tendency nowadays to wander in wilderness is delightful to see. 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 fountains of life. John Muir
What would the world be, once bereft / Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, / O let them be left, wildness and wet; / Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. Gerard Manley Hopkins
God hath sifted a nation that he might send choice grain into this wilderness. William Stoughton
Wilderness. The word itself is music. Edward Abbey
If things go bad and everything seems to go wrong, the best place to go is right into the remote wilderness, and everything's in balance there. Clarence Petty
Wilderness is two things—fact and feeling. It is a fund of knowledge and a spring of influence. It is the ultimate source of health—terrestrial and human. Benton MacKaye
The wilderness is healing, a therapy for the soul. Nicholas Kristof
The wilderness is a place that every believer has to experience to be moulded for their divine purpose. E'yen A. Gardner
To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands. Terry Tempest Williams
It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness untouched so that a tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its curve without generating electricity. Bernard DeVoto⁠
We're losing our wetlands, our wilderness! Every day, we are paving over nature! Kent Quigley