"What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness."
— John Muir

"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 indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden: Or, Life in the Woods)

"To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love him."
— Frederick Buechner

"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity..."
— John Muir

"It was like hiking into a Hemingway story; everything was sepia-toned and bristling with subtext."
— Leslie What (Crazy Love)

"I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness."
— Aldo Leopold

"There is a love of wild nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties"
— John Muir

"Returning home is the most difficult part of long-distance hiking; You have grown outside the puzzle and your piece no longer fits."
— Cindy Ross

"Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries."
— Jimmy Carter

"Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down."
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés (Women Who Run with the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman)

"All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream."
— T.K. Whipple

"A flower's structure leads a bee toward having pollen adhere to its body . . . we don't know of any such reason why beautiful places attract humans."
— David Rains Wallace (Untamed Garden and Other Personal Essays)

"All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish."
— Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac)

"It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness."
— Loren Eiseley

"[Thoreau's] famous night in jail took place about halfway through his stay in the cabin on Emerson's woodlot at Walden Pond. His two-year stint in the small cabin he built himself is often portrayed as a monastic retreat from the world of human affairs into the world of nautre, though he went back to town to eat with and talk to friends and family and to pick up money doing odd jobs that didn't fit into Walden's narrative. He went to jail both because the town jailer ran into him while he was getting his shoe mended and because he felt passionately enough about national affairs to refuse to pay his tax. To be in the woods was not to be out of society or politics."
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"Wilderness is a place where trees grow that were not planted, and a man can walk and he is not trespassing."
— Frances Zaunmiller

"The Wilderness holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask."
— Nancy Wynne Newhall

"Wilderness to the people pf America is a spiritual necessity, an antidote to the high pressure of modern life, a means of regaining serenity and equilibrium."
— Sigurd Olson

"...William Stegner...coined the term 'the geography of hope,' countering the argument that wilderness preservation served elites with the assertion that wilderness could be a place in which everyone could locate their hopefulness even if few actually entered it. "
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"I own a crevice stuffed with moss
and a couch of lemming fur;
I sit and listen to the music
of water dripping on a distant stone.
Or I sing to myself
of stealth and loneliness

No one comes to see me
but I hear outside
the scratching of claws,
the warm, inquisitive breath …
(from 'The Hermitage')"
— John Meade Haines (The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected Poems)

"Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other--outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"Now, wilderness can be seen as a useful fiction, a fiction constructed by John Muir and his heirs and deployed to keep places from being destroyed by resource extraction and wholesale development."
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

""And this is what happened, ands this is why the caribou and the wolf are one; for the caribou feeds the wolf, but it is the wolf that keeps the caribou strong.""
— Farley Mowat

"The whole concept of 'wild' was decidedly European, one not shared by the original inhabitants of this continent. What we called 'wilderness' was to the Indian a homeland, 'abiding loveliness' in Salish or Piegan. The land was not something to be feared or conquered, and 'wildlife' were neither wild nor alien; they were relatives."
— Doug Peacock (Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness)