Quotes about wild
page 2

“Abraham took an early start as a hunter, which was never much improved afterwards. A few days before the completion of his eighth year, in the absence of his father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the new log cabin, and Abraham with a rifle-gun standing inside, shot through a crack and killed one of them. He has never since pulled a trigger on any larger game.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

p, 125
1860s, A Short Autobiography (1860)

Game

“If the excrement of an elephant should be smeared on skin in which lice appear and left until it dries upon the skin, the lice will not remain on it but will depart immediately. If the fat of an elephant is smeared with it, it is said to cure the pain of one who suffers a headache; it is even said that if an ounce of elephant bone is drunk with ten ounces of wild mountain mint from something which a leper first touched, it does the most for a headache.”

Albertus Magnus (1206–1280) Dominican friar

Twenty-Six Books on Animals [De animalibus libri XXVI]; cited in: Plinio Prioreschi (1996) A History of Medicine: Medieval Medicine. p. 94.

Pain, Mountain, Suffering, Appearance

“Being a CEO is the nuts! A whole jumble of thoughts come to mind: Over the top. Wild. Fun. Outrageous. Crazy. Passion. Perpetual motion. The give-and-take. Meetings into the night. Incredible friendships. Fine wine. Celebrations. Great golf courses. Big decisions in the real game. Crises and pressure. Lots of swings. A few home runs. The thrill of winning. The pain of losing. It's as good as it gets! You get paid a lot, but the real payoff is in the fun.”

Jack Welch (1935) American executive: General Electric CEO

Source: Jack: Straight from the Gut (2001), Ch. 24.

Pain, Friendship, Home, Game

“With eyes up-raised, as one inspired,
Pale Melancholy sate retired,
And from her wild sequestered seat,
In notes by distance made more sweet,
Poured thro' the mellow horn her pensive soul.”

William Collins (1721–1759) English poet, born 1721

Source: The Passions, an Ode for Music (1747), Line 57. Compare: "Sweetest melodies / Are those that are by distance made more sweet", William Wordsworth, Personal Talk, stanza 2.

Soul

“I want to live life to the ultimate high,
Maybe I'll die young like heroes die,
Maybe I'll kiss you some wild special way.
If nobody kills me or thrills me soon,
I'll die in your arms under the cherry moon.”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

Under the Cherry Moon
Song lyrics, Parade Under the Cherry Moon (1986)

Life, Way, Kiss

“It is a complaint without foundation that "to very few people is granted the faculty of comprehending what is imparted to them, and that most, through dullness of understanding, lose their labor and their time." On the contrary, you will find the greater number of men both ready in conceiving and quick in learning, since such quickness is natural to man. As birds are born to fly, horses to run, and wild beasts to show fierceness, so to us peculiarly belong activity and sagacity of understanding.”
Falsa enim est querela, paucissimis hominibus vim percipiendi quae tradantur esse concessam, plerosque vero laborem ac tempora tarditate ingenii perdere. Nam contra plures reperias et faciles in excogitando et ad discendum promptos. Quippe id est homini naturale, ac sicut aves ad volatum, equi ad cursum, ad saevitiam ferae gignuntur, ita nobis propria est mentis agitatio atque sollertia.

Quintilian (35–96) ancient Roman rhetor

Book I, Chapter I, 1; translation by Rev. John Selby Watson
De Institutione Oratoria (c. 95 AD)

Men, People, Understanding, Nature

“Greetings from Fairbanks! This is the last you shall hear from me Wayne. Arrived here 2 days ago. It was very difficult to catch rides in the Yukon Territory, but I finally got here. Please return all mail I receive to the sender. It might be a very long time before I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don't ever hear from me again I want you to know your [sic] a great man. I now walk into the wild. Alex.”

Christopher McCandless (1968–1992) American hiker and explorer

In a postcard sent to Wayne Westerberg, April 27, 1992.
Source: Mary Ellen Barnes (ed.). Back to the Wild (2nd ed.). Twin Star Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-9833955-0-8. (pp. 172-173)

Time

“Even with all our technological accomplishments and urban sophistication, we consider ourselves blessed, healed in some manner, forgiven, and for a moment transported into some other world, when we catch a passing glimpse of an animal in the wild: a deer in some woodland, a fox crossing a field, a butterfly in its dancing flight southward to its wintering region, a hawk soaring in the distant sky, a hummingbird come into our garden, fireflies signaling to each other in the evening. So we might describe the thousandfold moments when we experience our meetings with the animals in their unrestrained and undomesticated status. Such incidents as these remind us that the universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not of objects to be exploited.”

Thomas Berry (1914–2009) American priest

Source: Evening Thoughts, Chapter 3, pp. 37-38

World, Communication, Universe, Distant

“The rude, discursive Thinker is the Scholastic (Schoolman Logician). The true Scholastic is a mystical Subtlist; out of logical Atoms he builds his Universe; he annihilates all living Nature, to put an Artifice of Thoughts (Gedankenkunststuck, literally Conjuror's-trick of Thoughts) in its room. His aim is an infinite Automaton. Opposite to him is the rude, intuitive Poet: this is a mystical Macrologist: he hates rules and fixed form; a wild, violent life reigns instead of it in Nature; all is animate, no law; wilfulness and wonder everywhere. He is merely dynamical. Thus does the Philosophic Spirit arise at first, in altogether separate masses. In the second stage of culture these masses begin to come in contact, multifariously enough; and, as in the union of infinite Extremes, the Finite, the Limited arises, so here also arise "Eclectic Philosophers" without number; the time of misunderstanding begins. The most limited is, in this stage, the most important, the purest Philosopher of the second stage. This class occupies itself wholly with the actual, present world, in the strictest sense. The Philosophers of the first class look down with contempt on those of the second; say, they are a little of everything, and so nothing; hold their views as the results of weakness, as Inconsequentism. On the contrary, the second class, in their turn, pity the first; lay the blame on their visionary enthusiasm, which they say is absurd, even to insanity.”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

Pupils at Sais (1799)

Life, Hate, World, Law

“[I]n so far as the Government lands can be disposed of, I am in favor of cutting up the wild lands into parcels, so that every poor man may have a home.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Speech to Germans at Cincinnati, Ohio (1861), Commercial version

Home

“In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.”

Isoroku Yamamoto (1884–1943) Japanese Marshal Admiral

Statement to Japanese cabinet minister Shigeharu Matsumoto and Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoe, as quoted in Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan (1985) by Ronald Spector. This remark would later prove prophetic; precisely six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese navy would suffer a major defeat at the Battle of Midway, from which it never recovered.

War, Success, Victory

“I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth and an insult to our intelligence to deny.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1830s, The Lyceum Address (1838)

Truth, Fear, Justice, Law

“We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. (He is already on the way; he is like Mohammed. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with a wild god.)”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

The Symbolic Life — in The Collected Works: The Symbolic Life. Miscellaneous Writings (1977), p. 281

God, Way

“A change came o'er my Vision - it was night:
We clove a pathway through a frantic throng:
The steeds, wild-plunging, filled us with affright:
The chariots whirled along.

Within a marble hall a river ran -
A living tide, half muslin and half cloth:
And here one mourned a broken wreath or fan,
Yet swallowed down her wrath”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Four Riddles, no. I
Rhyme? and Reason? (1883)

Change, Clothes, Night

“The cold winds sweeping the mountain-height,
And pathless was the dreary wild,
And ’mid the cheerless hours of night
A mother wandered with her child:
As through the drifting snows she press’d,
The babe was sleeping on her breast.”

Seba Smith (1792–1868) American humorist

The Snow Storm.

Mountain, Sleep, Night

“The tantra masters are simply wild flowers, they have everything in them.”

Rajneesh (1931–1990) Godman and leader of the Rajneesh movement

Tantra: the Supreme Understanding (1984)

Flowers

“Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Chihuahua and Sonora: The Green Lagoons", p. 157-158.

Love, Freedom, Country

“The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap, and thus the hunters take it.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XX Humorous Writings

Love, Fear, Sleep, Forgetting

“For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not — and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Black Cat

The Black Cat (1843)

Dreams, Home, Soul, Sense

“Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

September 1913 http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1576/, st. 3 Responsibilities (1914)

Wolf, Dead

“The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture for wild beasts to fight in.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Les anciens Romains élevaient des prodiges d'architecture pour faire combattre des bêtes.
Letter addressed to "un premier commis" [name unknown] (20 June 1733), from Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Correspondance [Garnier frères, Paris, 1880], vol. I, letter # 343 (p. 354)
Citas

Fight

“Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line
Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine;
Whose fever'd fancy shuns the measur'd pace,
And copies Ovid's filth without his grace.
In his rough brain a genius might have grown,
Had he not sought to play the brute alone;
But void of shame, he let his wit run wild,
And liv'd and wrote as Adam's bestial child.
Averse to culture, strange to humankind,
He never knew the pleasures of the mind.
Scorning the pure, the delicate, the clean,
His joys were sordid, and his morals mean.
Thro' his gross thoughts a native vigour ran,
From which he deem'd himself the perfect man:
But want of decency his rank decreas'd,
And sunk him to the level of the beast.
Would that his Muse had dy'd before her birth,
Nor spread such foul corruption o'er the earth.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Orignially written as part of an "Essay on Modern Poets" this was published as a "Fragment on Whitman” (c. 1912) in The Ancient Track (2001) edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 192
Non-Fiction

Pleasure, Soul, Birth, Swine

“On turning 30: "I kind of feel like the same person except more time has gone by. I hate to say that I feel like an adult now. I have to admit I wish I was still 18. After all, even through the time while I was representing that wild kid, I really wasn't. I was just living my life. I was just not making movies at the time.”

Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) American actor and film producer

http://www.flixster.com/actor/leonardo-di-caprio/leonardo-dicaprio-quotes

Life, Hate, Feeling, Time

“Upon the brink of the wild stream
He stood, and dreamt a mighty dream.”

Aleksandr Pushkin The Bronze Horseman

Original: (ru) ‎На берегу пустынных волн Стоял он, дум великих полн.
Source: The Bronze Horseman (1833) trans. Charles Johnston.

Dreams

“Oh thinkin’ about all our younger years.
There was only you and me.
We were young and wild and free.
Now nothing can take you away from me.
We've been down that road before.
But that's over now.
You keep me coming back for more.And baby you're all that I want.
When you're lying here in my arms,
I’m finding it hard to believe we're in heaven.”

Bryan Adams (1959) Canadian singer-songwriter

Heaven
Song lyrics, Reckless (1984)

Lying, Baby

“Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!—
But time goes on, and will, unheeding,
Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn,
And the wild days set true hearts bleeding.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

All Lovely Things (1916)

Love, Youth, Time, Heart

“West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Colour Out of Space (1927)
Context: West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs. The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night.

“Ah, yes, in that hour of our souls dream-driven,
In that high, white hour, O my wild sea-bride,
The tears and the years will be all forgiven, …
And all be justified.”

Edwin Markham (1852–1940) American poet

Source: The Shoes of Happiness, and Other Poems (1913), The Crowning Hour, III
Context: p>As we go star-stilled in the mystic garden,
All the prose of this life run there to rhyme,
How eagerly then will the poor heart pardon
All of these hurts of Time!Ah, yes, in that hour of our souls dream-driven,
In that high, white hour, O my wild sea-bride,
The tears and the years will be all forgiven, …
And all be justified.</p

Dreams, Soul, Tear, Sea

“You're safe; that's gone, that wild caprice,
But tell me once before I cease,
Which does your Church esteem the kinder role,
To kill the body or destroy the soul?”

Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) English writer and gardener

"And so it ends" quoted in V. Sackville-West : A Critical Biography (1974) by Michael Stevens, p. 91
Context: Darling, I thought of nothing mean;
I thought of killing straight and clean.
You're safe; that's gone, that wild caprice,
But tell me once before I cease,
Which does your Church esteem the kinder role,
To kill the body or destroy the soul?

Soul

“In new and wild communities where there is violence, an honest man must protect himself; and until other means of securing his safety are devised, it is both foolish and wicked to persuade him to surrender his arms while the men who are dangerous to the community retain theirs.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, Nobel lecture (1910)
Context: In new and wild communities where there is violence, an honest man must protect himself; and until other means of securing his safety are devised, it is both foolish and wicked to persuade him to surrender his arms while the men who are dangerous to the community retain theirs. He should not renounce the right to protect himself by his own efforts until the community is so organized that it can effectively relieve the individual of the duty of putting down violence. So it is with nations. Each nation must keep well prepared to defend itself until the establishment of some form of international police power, competent and willing to prevent violence as between nations. As things are now, such power to command peace throughout the world could best be assured by some combination between those great nations which sincerely desire peace and have no thought themselves of committing aggressions. The combination might at first be only to secure peace within certain definite limits and on certain definite conditions; but the ruler or statesman who should bring about such a combination would have earned his place in history for all time and his title to the gratitude of all mankind.

Men, Communication

“O she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

The Folly Of Being Comforted http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1623/ In The Seven Woods (1904) Context: One that is ever kind said yesterday: 'Your well-belovéd's hair has threads of grey, And little shadows come about her eyes; Time can but make it easier to be wise Though now it seems impossible, and so All that you need is patience.' Heart cries, 'No, I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain. Time can but make her beauty over again: Because of that great nobleness of hers The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs, Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways When all the wild summer was in her gaze.' O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head, You'd know the folly of being comforted.

Way, Summer

“Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature — or more exactly, in the variety of our experience.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

As quoted in The God Particle (1993) by Leon Lederman – ISBN 978–0–618–71168–0
Context: The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike. Faraday did this when he closed the link between electricity and magnetism. Clerk Maxwell did it when he linked both with light. Einstein linked time with space, mass with energy, and the path of light past the sun with the flight of a bullet; and spent his dying years in trying to add to these likenesses another, which would find a single imaginative order between the equations between Clerk Maxwell and his own geometry of gravitation When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought: beauty he said, is "unity in variety." Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature — or more exactly, in the variety of our experience.

Search, Nature, Science

“It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, Autobiographical Sketch Written for Jesse W. Fell (1859)
Context: My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age, and he grew up literally without education. He removed from Kentucky to what is now Spencer County, Indiana, in my eighth year. We reached our new home about the time the State came into the Union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.<!--p.33

Animals

“O lyric Love, half angel and half bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire”

Robert Browning The Ring and the Book

Book I : The Ring and the Book .
The Ring and the Book (1868-69)
Context: O lyric Love, half angel and half bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire, —
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
And sang a kindred soul out to his face, —
Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart—
When the first summons from the darkling earth
Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,
And bared them of the glory — to drop down,
To toil for man, to suffer or to die, —
This is the same voice: can thy soul know change?
Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!

Love, Angels, Bird

“In search of my Love
I will go over mountains and strands;
I will gather no flowers,
I will fear no wild beasts;
And pass by the mighty and the frontiers. ~ 3”

John of the Cross (1542–1591) Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint

Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom

Love, Fear, Search, Mountain

“Animals only follow their natural instincts; but man, unless he has experienced the influence of learning and philosophy, is at the mercy of impulses that are worse than those of a wild beast. There is no beast more savage and dangerous than a human being who is swept along by the passions of ambition, greed, anger, envy, extravagance, and sensuality.”

Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and theologian

De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis declamatio (1529), translated by Beert C. Verstraete as On Education for Children, in The Erasmus Reader (University of Toronto Press: 1990), p. 73

Nature, Learning, Passion, Animals

“Wild horses couldn't drag me away
Wild, wild horses, couldn't drag me away.”

Mick Jagger (1943) British rock musician, member of The Rolling Stones

"Wild Horses (The Rolling Stones song)" (co-written with Keith Richards), on Sticky Fingers (1971).
Lyrics
Context: Childhood living is easy to do
The things you wanted, I bought them for you
Graceless lady, you know who I am
You know I can't let you slide through my hands
Wild horses couldn't drag me away
Wild, wild horses, couldn't drag me away.

Horse

“A criminal who, having renounced reason … hath, by the unjust violence and slaughter he hath committed upon one, declared war against all mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a lion or tyger, one of those wild savage beasts with whom men can have no society nor security.”

John Locke book Two Treatises of Government

Second Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. II, sec. 11
Two Treatises of Government (1689)
Context: A criminal who, having renounced reason … hath, by the unjust violence and slaughter he hath committed upon one, declared war against all mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a lion or tyger, one of those wild savage beasts with whom men can have no society nor security. And upon this is grounded the great law of Nature, "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."

Men, War

“I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule —
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE — out of TIME.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

"Dreamland", st. 1 (1845).
Context: By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule —
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE — out of TIME.

Time

“All the wild witches, those most noble ladies,
For all their broom-sticks and their tears,
Their angry tears, are gone.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Lines Written In Dejection http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1524/, st. 1 The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) Context: When have I last looked on The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies Of the dark leopards of the moon? All the wild witches, those most noble ladies, For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone.

Tear

“We need, in the interest of the community at large, a rigid system of game laws rigidly enforced, and it is not only admissible, but one may almost say necessary, to establish, under the control of the State, great national forest reserves, which shall also be breeding grounds and nurseries for wild game; but I should much regret to see grow up in this country a system of large private game preserves, kept for the enjoyment of the very rich.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

The Wilderness Hunter, p. 270 (1893)
1890s

Law, Game, Communication, Country

“Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it. For them there is no winter food problem. They have fires and warm clothes. The winter cannot hurt them and therefore increases their sense of cleverness and security. For birds and animals, as for poor men, winter is another matter. Rabbits, like most wild animals, suffer hardship.”

Richard Adams book Watership Down

Watership Down (1972)

Men, Food, Feeling, Problem

“The wild elephant is the most important animal of the district. Without his assistance, when domesticated, it would be difficult indeed to work the forests. Wherever you go in the forests you find numberless pitfalls excavated for his capture; but, as a rule, they are mostly old ones, half filled in. Numbers of. elephants are captured by Nayars and Mappillas, and broken in for timber dragging, winch is done entirely by the teeth; the elephant seizing a thick cable made of grewia fibre in his trunk, and biting the end between his molars, drags the log, to which the other end of the cable has been made fast.”

William Logan (author) book Malabar Manual

Malabar Manual, Page 58 https://archive.org/details/MalabarLogan/page/n70 Malabar Manual (1887)

Animals

“We walk this earth
hand with hand and head by head
along with shadows of fairy tales
myths and legends spread by superstitious folks
and oddly we yearn to all of them
with sadness and despair
like drowning sailor who longs for sip of air
with playful joy against the odds
we seek to tame good auld death
forgetting that lady D is a wild cat
that carves its paths with fangs and claws step by step
step by step
until she is to close
- inside your head”

Marcin Malek (1975) Polish writer

Source: We'll go asleep, poems and ballads, "Untill she is to close", pg 64

Death, Sadness, Cats, Joy

“I'm known as a survivor now, I hope so, for the jail thing, bullets and everything, controversies and everything, I hope so. And I want to be in the future known as somebody. You know I want people to be talking about me like you know: "remember when he was real bad, remember when Tupac was real bad". You know what I mean, they do that about a lot of actors now, like John Travolta I read stories like "remember you were wild."”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

And all these other people, and now they're like sweet hearts. We all should get that chance, I just want my chance.
1990s, MTV interview with Tabitha Soren (1995)

Bad luck, People, Hope, Reading

“There is no rule of thumb when it comes to survival. Everything is allowed, even behaving like a wild animal.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Animals

“He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Life, Happiness, Water, Heart

“Come here, wild thing,” -Nick Allegrezza”

Rachel Gibson (1961) American writer

Source: Truly Madly Yours

“Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair and let us huddle together as darkness takes over. We are at home amidst the birds and the trees, for we are children of nature.”

Susan Polis Schutz (1944) American poet

Children, Home, Flowers, Nature

“That proves something- that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

Animals

“In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walking

Source: Walking (June 1862)

World

“She saw in his eyes defeat of her wild dreams, her mad desires.”

Margaret Mitchell book Vom Winde verweht (1937 German edition)

Source: Gone with the Wind

Dreams, Madness

“Im studying jerkoffs in the wild," Ben answered dryly. "This seemed like a good chance to view one up close.”

Kathy Reichs book Code

Source: Code

Study, Chance

“Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Secret, Joy

“Electric, wild, one foot in the swamp. Never going to crawl all the way out. And I wanted to have sex with whatever he was.
(Mac about Barrons)”

Karen Marie Moning book Darkfever

Source: Darkfever

Sex, Way

“Adam wants to know what took you so long?
"Tell him I had wild, passionate sex with a complete stranger.”

Patricia Briggs book Blood Bound

Source: Blood Bound

Sex, Passion

“The Hero cares not for a wild winter's storm. For it carries him swift on the back of the storm. All may be lost and our hearts may be worn, but a Hero fights forever.”

Cressida Cowell (1966) British writer

Source: How to Twist a Dragon's Tale

Winter, Heart, Fight

“That's the trouble with loving a wild thing: You're always left watching the door.”

Edith Pattou book East

Source: East

Love

“I'm getting the impression that women, in any form, scare you."
He shrugged. "They're the more violent species. And unpredictable. I'd rather take on a wild boar. You can't shoot women.”

Maya Banks (1964) Author

Source: Hidden Away

Women

“His eyes are wild, psychotic slits that bat-dance in your soul looking for good things to crush or bad elements to identify with.”

Irvine Welsh (1958) Scottish novelist

Soul, Dance

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Variant: He who delights in solitude is either a wild beast or a God.

God, Solitude

“Fitz: Shall we get up tomorrow and go looking for a wild pig?
Nighteyes: I didn’t lose any wild pigs, did you?”

Robin Hobb book Fool's Errand

Source: Fool's Errand

“Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.”

Borís Pasternak (1890–1960) Russian writer

LIFE magazine (13 June 1960)

Tear, Night

“There are good sailors. Well, some good sailors. In a way they are ideal as husbands. They drop in every six months for a wild celebration, then they drop out again before one gets bored with their company or annoyed with by their habits.”

Kerry Greenwood (1954) Australian crime writer

Source: Queen of the Flowers

Way

“Man's mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild.”

James Allen book As a Man Thinketh

Source: As a Man Thinketh

Intelligence

“A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Life, Youth, Beauty, Angels

“Feelings can be like wild animals-we underrate how fierce they are until we've opened their cage”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: The Sunflower

Feeling, Animals

“Wild honey smells of freedom
The dust - of sunlight
The mouth of a young girl, like a violet
But gold - smells of nothing.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Girl, Freedom

“A garden should be natural-seeming, with wild sections, including a large area of bluebells.”

Diana Wynne Jones book Castle in the Air

Source: Castle in the Air

Nature

“With the truth so dull and depressing, the only working alternative is wild bursts of madness and filigree.”

Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Source: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Truth, Madness

“We name us and then we are lost, tamed
I choose words, more words, to cure the tameness, not the wildness”

Alice Notley (1945) American poet

Source: Mysteries of Small Houses

“Wild nights are my glory!”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

Night

“Be serious,” said Enjolras. “I am wild,” replied Grantaire.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

“Revenge is more wild, less calculated… deeply personal. Retribution is a punishment that is morally right and fully deserved. (Mitch Rapp)”

Vince Flynn (1966–2013) American writer of fiction

Source: American Assassin

Revenge, Personality

“Wild and disrespectful? Who the hell are you anyway? Outsourced help?”

Richelle Mead Shadow Kiss

Source: Shadow Kiss

Hell, Help

“I’m about to make a wild, extreme, and severe relationship rule: the word “busy” is a load of crap and is most often used by assholes.”

Greg Behrendt (1963) American comedian

Business

“Oh yes, I know the way to heaven was easy. We found the little kingdom of our passion that all can share who walk the road of lovers. In wild and secret happiness we stumbled; and gods and demons clamoured in our senses.”

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) English poet, diarist and memoirist

Source: The Poems of Wilfred Owen

God, Happiness, Secret, Way

“The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase.”

Hunter S. Thompson book The Curse of Lono

Source: The Curse of Lono

Soul, Nature, Passion

“In a world of monotonous horror
there could be no salvation in wild dreaming.”

Richard Matheson book I Am Legend

Source: I Am Legend

World, Dreams

“No rescue boat can save the touches I left bobbing in the wild ocean of your flesh, but if they cut open your heart, like the belly of a shark, dumped its contents on a table—would there be any trace of me?”

Jeffrey McDaniel (1967) American writer

Source: The Splinter Factory

Heart

“I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.”

Lionel Shriver book We Need to Talk About Kevin

Source: We Need to Talk About Kevin

Freedom

“And the worst thing was, there were no mirrors out there in the wild, so the princess was left wondering whether she in fact was still beautiful… or if the fall had changed the story completely.”

Scott Westerfeld book Pretties

Source: Pretties

Beauty, Change, Princess

“Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

World, Hope, Future, Despair

“He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

Life, Happiness, Water, Heart

“When a nation forgets her skill in war, when her religion becomes a mockery, when the whole nation becomes a nation of money-grabbers, then the wild tribes, the barbarians drive in… Who will our invaders be? From whence will they come?”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

From a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith (July 1923)
Letters

Money, War, Religion, Forgetting

“She had wild eyes, slightly insane. She also carried an overload of compassion that was real enough and which obviously cost her something.”

Charles Bukowski book Women

Source: Women

“The mind I love must have wild places.”

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand author

Love

“She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.”

Borís Pasternak book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago

Sense

“Alas! when passion is both meek and wild!”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Passion

“He was like some wild, untamed creature that you could keep and feed for a time, but in the end you knew you'd have to let it go for its own sake as well as yours.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon Night Embrace

Source: Night Embrace

Time

“Riggedy riggedy white
Come and spend the night
We'll play some games
Some wild some tame
Cause if you will, you might.

By, Laberge”

D.J. MacHale (1955) American television director and producer

Game, Night

“And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.”

Maurice Sendak book Where the Wild Things Are

Source: Where the Wild Things Are

Love

“Beckendorf, whose legs were now working fine (nothing like being chased by a huge monster to get your body back in order) shook his head and gasped for breath. “You shouldn’t have turned it on! It’s unstable! After a few years, automatons go wild!”

Rick Riordan book The Demigod Files

Source: The Demigod Files

“I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”

William Faulkner book As I Lay Dying

Source: As I Lay Dying

Feeling

“No one had ever called her wild before. She wanted to be wild now, for him. Wild seemed more enticing then a bowl of berries.”

Shannon Hale Forest Born

Source: Forest Born

“Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.”

Flannery O’Connor book Wise Blood

Source: Wise Blood

Tree, Water

“And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming wild things.”

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books

Acceptance speech upon being awarded the Caldecott Medal for Where the Wild Things Are (1964), published in Newbery and Caldecott Medal Books, 1956-65, edited by Lee Kingman (1965)
Context: Certainly we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and that intensify anxiety; and to a point we can prevent premature exposure to such experiences. That is obvious. But what is just as obvious — and what is too often overlooked — is the fact that from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.

Children