Quotes about wild
page 4

Maurice Sendak book Where the Wild Things Are

Variant: "And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!"
Source: Where the Wild Things Are (1963)

“I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

“No. really, what was the point? She could hardly top Version Fifteen, which had featured both vivisection and wild boar.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: What Happens in London

“Can we please focus? We are supposed to be professionals." Holly said.

"Not me!" said Orion cheerily, "I'm just a Teenager with hormones running wild and may I say, young fairy lady, they're running wild in your direction.”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Atlantis Complex

“Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason [Zaphood] had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Life, Success

“Emotions were like wild horses and it required wisdom to be able to control them”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Wisdom, Horse

“I could more easily contain Niagara Falls in a tea cup than I can comprehend the wild, uncontainable love of God.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out

Love, God, Tea

“I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden

Love, Life, Men

“For death and life, in ceaseless strife,
Beat wild on this world’s shore,
And all our calm is in that balm—
Not lost but gone before.”

Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton (1808–1877) English feminist, social reformer, and author

Not lost but gone before (c. 1863).

Life, Death, World

“Sheriff of Rotingham King illegal forest to pig wild kill in it a is!”

Mel Brooks (1926) American director, writer, actor, and producer

Robin Hood: Men in Tights

“Ah, deeply the Minstrel has felt all he sings,
Every passion he paints his own bosom has known;
No note of wild music is swept from the strings,
But first his own feelings have echoed the tone.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(27th April 1822) The Poet
4th May 1822) Sappho see The Vow of the Peacock (1835
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822

Music, Feeling, Passion, Singing

“In the flush of the hot June prime,
O'ersleek flood-tides afire,
I hear him hurry the chime
To the bidding of checked Desire;
Till the sweated ringers tire
And the wild bob-majors die.
Could I wait for my turn in the godly choir?
(Shoal! 'Ware shoal!) Not I!”

Rudyard Kipling The Bell Buoy

The Bell Buoy.
Other works

Waiting

“Audiences who have been forced to wade through the thick middle-class padding of more expensively made movies to get to the action enjoy the nose-thumbing at "good taste" of cheap movies that stick to the raw materials. At some basic level they like the pictures to be cheaply done, they enjoy the crudeness; it’s a breather, a vacation from proper behavior and good taste and required responses. Patrons of burlesque applaud politely for the graceful erotic dancer but go wild for the lewd lummox who bangs her big hips around. That’s what they go to burlesque for.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Behavior

“The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 26

Death, Faith, Madness

“I had innumerable visions at that time [c. 1903]; wherever I looked, Nature was alive, the sky, the clouds, on every stone and among the branches of the trees, everywhere my creatures stirred and lived their still or wild, lively lives, arousing my excitement and crying out to be painted.”

Emil Nolde (1867–1956) German artist

1900 - 1920

Nature, Tree, Time, Painting

“His eyes had death in them, his and mine. His belly was bloated and I could smell the stench of a festering wound, the sickening odor of old blood impregnated into cloth. There was a wildness in his face and his mouth was a tight slash that showed all his teeth. Marv Kania was young, but right there he was as old as death itself.”

Mickey Spillane book The Snake

The Snake (1964)

Death, Clothes

“In the case of Islam, our effort aims at raising the dialogue from the street level to the level of scholarly platforms. For a long time, Hindus have been flattering Muslims by seeing nothing wrong in the doctrine of Islam. For a long time, Muslims have been taking to the streets and shedding blood whenever and wherever Hindus object to their behaviour pattern. Muslims have never been asked by Hindus to reflect on the dogmas of Islam, and revise them wherever they go against peaceful coexistence. We are appealing to Hindus to start asking some questions about Islam so that Muslims are made to rethink. If asking questions with a view to holding a dialogue is provoking violence, we plead guilty again. Hindus had a long tradition of asking questions even about their own cherished doctrines. I wonder if you are well-acquainted with our acharyas - Brahmanic, Buddhist and the rest. It was only with the advent of Islam and, later on, Christianity that Hindus were terrorised into the habit of remaining silent when faced with wild claims and not asking any questions. We are trying to revive the ancient Hindu tradition.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

Peace, Question, Effort, Time

“You do not believe that souls are assigned, first to one body and then to another, and that our so-called death is merely a change of abode? You do not believe that in cattle, or in wild beasts, or in creatures of the deep, the soul of him who was once a man may linger? You do not believe that nothing on this earth is annihilated, but only changes its haunts? And that animals also have cycles of progress and, so to speak, an orbit for their souls, no less than the heavenly bodies, which revolve in fixed circuits? Great men have put faith in this idea; therefore, while holding to your own view, keep the whole question in abeyance in your mind. If the theory is true, it is a mark of purity to refrain from eating flesh; if it be false, it is economy. And what harm does it do to you to give such credence? I am merely depriving you of food which sustains lions and vultures.”

Sotion (Pythagorean) ancient greek philosopher

Quoted in Seneca the Younger, Moral letters to Lucilius, CVIII, 20-21.

Death, Men, Faith, Food

“Sitting Bull, most renowned Sioux of modern history, is dead.
He was not a Chief, but without Kingly lineage he arose from a lowly position to the greatest Medicine Man of his time, by virtue of his shrewdness and daring.
He was an Indian with a white man's spirit of hatred and revenge for those who had wronged him and his. In his day he saw his son and his tribe gradually driven from their possessions: forced to give up their old hunting grounds and espouse the hard working and uncongenial avocations of the whites. And these, his conquerors, were marked in their dealings with his people by selfishness, falsehood and treachery. What wonder that his wild nature, untamed by years of subjection, should still revolt? What wonder that a fiery rage still burned within his breast and that he should seek every opportunity of obtaining vengeance upon his natural enemies.”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

Saturday Pioneer (20 December 1890)
The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer (1890 and 1891)

People, History, Revenge, Nature

“It is impossible to explain the latest works of these wild men | that is, the artists of Der Blaue Reiter, and Die Brücke, [working in Munich, and Berlin] in terms of a formal evolution and a reinterpretation of Impressionism. The loveliest prismatic colors and the famous Cubist style have become meaningless in terms of the objectives of the iconoclasts. Their thinking has a different aim: with their labor, they want to create symbols for their era. symbols that belong on the altars of the coming spiritual religions behind which the technical producer will vanish.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Quote of Franz Marc, in his text in the Almanac of the 'Blaue Reiter', 1912; as cited in Expressionism, a German intuition, 1905-1920, Neugroschel, Joachim; Vogt, Paul; Keller, Horst; Urban, Martin; Dube, Wolf Dieter; (transl. Joachim Neugroschel); publisher: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1980, p. 95
1911 - 1914

Men, Religion, Color, Thinking

“You know what my drink is? Jack Daniel's. Yes, that is a wild man drink. That should come with bail money, you know what I'm saying? Because on Jack, you don't know where you're going to end up, but you know when you get there, you won't be wearing any pants.”

Dave Attell (1965) comedian

Comedy Central Presents: Dave Attell

Money, Drink

“But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us, to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

"The Buried Life" (1852), st. 6

Life, World, Knowledge, Heart

“Sometimes it pays to be a little wild.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Source: 1980s, Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), p. 5

“The people resemble a wild beast, which, naturally fierce and accustomed to live in the woods, has been brought up, as it were, in a prison and in servitude, and having by accident got its liberty, not being accustomed to search for its food, and not knowing where to conceal itself, easily becomes the prey of the first who seeks to incarcerate it again.”

Niccolo Machiavelli book Discourses on Livy

Book 1, Ch. 16
Discourses on Livy (1517)

People, Food, Search, Nature

“There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Christian Nestell Bovee, in Intuitions and Summaries of Thought (1862), Volume I, p. 124
Misattributed

Communication

“Norway, too, has noble wild prospects; and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, Sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

July 6, 1763, p. 120
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I

“The reason Wilde did his best work after turning homosexual is that women simply reinforced his own feminine sentimentality. … Heterosexuality inhibited his imagination because woman is physically and psychologically internal.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 571

Women, Imagination

“… I must say, it [the Koran] is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite; — insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran … It is the confused ferment of a great rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words … We said "stupid:" yet natural stupidity is by no means the character of Mahomet's Book; it is natural uncultivation rather. The man has not studied speaking; in the haste and pressure of continual fighting, has not time to mature himself into fit speech … The man was an uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging to him: we must take him for that. But for a wretched Simulacrum, a hungry Impostor without eyes or heart … we will not and cannot take him. Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the Koran; what had rendered it precious to the wild Arab men … Curiously, through these incondite masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint, ejaculation in the Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what we might almost call poetry, is found straggling.”

Thomas Carlyle book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History

Thomas Carlyle, "On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History" (1841), pg. 64-67
1840s

Men, Books, Stupidity, Soul

“Her eyes would make an angel smile.
They'd call her Sunday.
She'll take a man and drive him wild.
Her name is Sunday,
And one day I'm gonna make her mine.
It's gonna be so fine.
You wait and see,
It's gonna be
Just Sunday and me.”

Neil Diamond (1941) American singer-songwriter

Sunday and Me, performed by Jay and the Americans (1965)
Song lyrics

Smile, Angels, Waiting

“A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat,
A careless shoestring, in whose tie
I see a wild civility,
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.”

Robert Herrick book Hesperides

"Delight in Disorder".
Hesperides (1648)

Art, Parting

“[Concerning the founding of the Sierra Club] Hoping that we will be able to do something for wildness and make the mountains glad.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

letter to Henry Senger http://digitalcollections.pacific.edu/cdm/ref/collection/muirletters/id/14187/show/14186 (22 May 1892) <br class="br">1890s

Hope, Mountain

“Prepare to let your right brain run wild.”

Reggie Fils-Aimé (1961) American businessman

On Wii
Source: E3 2005 Press Conference

“So they march with sovereign tread…
Behind them limps the hungry dog,
and wrapped in wild snow at their head
carrying a blood-red flag
soft-footed where the blizzard swirls,
invulnerable where bullets crossed –
crowned with a crown of
snowflake pearls,
a flowery diadem of frost,
ahead of them goes Jesus Christ.”

Alexander Blok The Twelve

The Twelve (1918); translation from Jon Stallworthy and Peter France (trans.) The Twelve, and Other Poems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) p. 160.

Dogs, Christ

“I do not paint by copying nature. Everything I do springs from my wild imagination.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 22: quote in a letter to Ambroise Vollard, 1900

Imagination, Spring, Nature, Painting

“It makes no difference abroad,
The seasons fit the same,
The mornings blossom into noons,
And split their pods of flame.

Wild-flowers kindle in the woods,
The brooks brag all the day;
No blackbird bates his jargoning
For passing Calvary.

Auto-da-fé and judgment
Are nothing to the bee;
His separation from his rose
To him seems misery.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Nature, p. 120
Collected Poems (1993)

Flowers, Bee, Season

“As geographers, Sosius, crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, and unapproachable bogs.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Life of Theseus, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

World, Parting

“I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course — year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while, on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man. Many of them have no relation to him. The cycle of their existence has gone on independently of his, and is disturbed or broken by every advance in man’s intellectual development; and their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone, limited only by the equal well-being and perpetuation of the numberless other organisms with which each is more or less intimately connected.”

Alfred Russel Wallace book The Malay Archipelago

The Malay Archipelago (1869)

Love, Life, Death, Hate

“Zeal is that pure and heavenly flame,
The fire of love supplies;
While that which often bears the name,
Is self in a disguise. True zeal is merciful and mild,
Can pity and forbear;
The false is headstrong, fierce and wild,
And breathes revenge and war.”

John Newton Olney Hymns

Hymn 70: True and False Zeal
Olney Hymns (1779)

Love, War, Revenge, Falseness

“She just took off running to the old Perkins place. He couldn't help turning to watch. She ran as though it was her nature. It reminded him of the flight of wild ducks in the autumn. So smooth. The word "beautiful" came to his mind, but he shook it away and hurried up to his house.”

Katherine Paterson book Bridge to Terabithia

Jesse Aarons
Bridge to Terabithia (1977)

Beauty, Autumn, Nature, Help

“Yet from the viewpoint of the herd, rather than that of the shepherd, it’s hard to avoid the impression that for the vast majority of domesticated animals, the Agricultural Revolution was a terrible catastrophe. Their evolutionary ‘success’ is meaningless. A rare wild rhinoceros on the brink of extinction is probably more satisfied than a calf who spends its short life inside a tiny box, fattened to produce juicy steaks. The contented rhinoceros is no less content for being among the last of its kind. The numerical success of the calf’s species is little consolation for the suffering the individual endures.”

Yuval Noah Harari book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Life, Suffering, Success, Animals

“There was something in the wild strength of this landscape, once a battlefield, that seemed to be shouting at him, a presence born of that strength whose cry his whole being recognized as familiar, caught and threw back into the wind, some youthful passage of courage and pride — the passionate, yet so nearly always hypocritical, affirmation of one’s soul perhaps, he thought, of the desire to be, to do, good, what was right.”

Malcolm Lowry book Under the Volcano

Source: Under the Volcano (1947), Ch. IV (p. 124)

Youth, Soul, Courage, Passion

“(Cat in bed) The Shedd Aquarium in Chicago recently identified a new species of fish…virtually extinct in the wild, and they haven't even named it yet. I dreamt I ate it.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 124

Cats, Fish

“To the sane and free it will hardly seem necessary to cross the continent in search of wild beauty, however easy the way, for they find it in abundance wherever they chance to be.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 1: The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West

Beauty, Way, Search, Chance

“Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

Lutetia; or, Paris. From the Augsberg Gazette, 12, VII (1842)

Time, Animals

“To this day my seat on a saddle or on the back of a horse is as secure and tireless as in a rocking chair, and far more pleasurable. Sometimes, in later years, when I found myself suddenly on a strange horse in a trooper's saddle, flying for life or liberty in front of pursuit, I blessed the baby lessons of the wild gallops among the beautiful colts.”

Clara Barton (1821–1912) American Civil War nurse

Barton, Clara H. The Story of My Childhood. New York: Baker & Taylor Company, 1907. Reprinted by Arno Press in 1980.

Life, Pleasure, Beauty, Horse

“I now understand the need for faith—pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith—as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 1 (p. 90)

Life, Faith, Law, Understanding

“This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just "What if…" It's "My God; what if…"”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

In frenzy and hysteria.
Introduction to The Golden Man (1980)

Love, God, Reading

“I could have never done it if David [Lynch] wasn’t a friend. He was very protective of me, like a big brother—he always has been. When it comes to Wild at Heart, if we had a love scene, everyone was very respectful… There’s no getting it wrong. Daring to go too extreme or too subtle or too anything—he requires it all of you and it’s all such fun and there’s no judgment on a set with David—ever. Except when I bring bottles of water on a set; he hates that.”

Laura Dern (1967) American actress, director, producer

As quoted in "Laura Dern on David Lynch" by Daniel Nemet-Nejat, Moviemaker, Moviemaker.com (23 January 2007) https://www.moviemaker.com/archives/moviemaking/directing/articles-directing/dern-on-lynch-3393/

Love, Hate, Water, Heart

“Remembrance clamoured in him: 'She was wild and free,
Magnificent in giving; she was blind
To gain or loss, and, loving, loved but me, — but me!”

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

"Bitterness"
Orchard and Vineyard (1921)

Love, Loss

“Edwin Fischer was, on the concert platform, a short, leonine, resilient figure, whose every fiber seemed to vibrate with elemental musical power. Wildness and gentleness were never far from each other in his piano-playing, and demonic outbursts would magically give way to inner peace. It was as little trouble to him (as Alfred Polgar once said of an actor) to lose himself as to find himself.
His playing of slow movements was full of an unselfconsciousness beside which the music-making of others, famous names included, seemed academic or insincere. With Fischer, one was in more immediate contact with the music: there was no curtain before the soul when he communicated with the audience. One other musician, Furtwangler, conveyed to the same degree this sensation of music not being played, but rather happening by itself.”

Alfred Brendel (1931) Austrian pianist, poet, and author

As cited in: Ruth Hanna Sachs, ‎D. E. Heap, ‎Joyce Light (2005). White Rose History, Volume II (Academic Version). p. 366

Peace, Music, Way, Soul

“Let me clarify at the outset that this decision to permit hunting of wild boars and blue bull in the wild is not taken for the sake of farmers, but to benefit those private forest lodge operators who have clients from Middle East and other countries.”

Maneka Gandhi (1956) Indian politician and activist

Criticising Madhya Pradesh government's move to simply hunting rules, as quoted in "Maneka miffed with MP govt's move to simplify hunting rules" http://www.firstpost.com/india/maneka-miffed-with-mp-govts-move-to-simplify-hunting-rules-188695.html, First Post (20 January 2012) <br class="br">2011-present

Decision, Country

“They knew me from the dawn of time: if Hermes beats his rainbow wings,
If Angus shakes his locks of light, or golden-haired Apollo sings,
It matters not the name, the land; my joy in all the gods abides:
Even in the cricket in the grass some dimness of me smiles and hides.
For joy of me the day star glows, and in delight and wild desire
The peacock twilight rays aloft its plumes and blooms of shadowy fire,
Where in the vastness too I burn through summer nights and ages long,
And with the fiery footed Watchers shake in myriad dance and song.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

God, Age, Smile, Star

“We who live abroad are accustomed to believe that almost all Eretz Yisrael is now uninhabited desert and whoever wishes can buy land there as he pleases. But this is not true. It is very difficult to find in the land [ha'aretz] cultivated fields that are not used for planting. Only those sand fields or stone mountains that would require the investment of hard labor and great expense to make them good for planting remain uncultivated and that's because the Arabs do not like working too much in the present for a distant future. Therefore, it is very difficult to find good land for cattle. And not only peasants, but also rich landowners, are not selling good land so easily…We who live abroad are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all wild desert people who, like donkeys, neither see nor understand what is happening around them. But this is a grave mistake. The Arab, like all the Semites, is sharp minded and shrewd. All the townships of Syria and Eretz Yisrael are full of Arab merchants who know how to exploit the masses and keep track of everyone with whom they deal – the same as in Europe. The Arabs, especially the urban elite, see and understand what we are doing and what we wish to do on the land, but they keep quiet and pretend not to notice anything. For now, they do not consider our actions as presenting a future danger to them. … But, if the time comes that our people's life in Eretz Yisrael will develop to a point where we are taking their place, either slightly or significantly, the natives are not going to just step aside so easily.”

Ahad Ha'am (1856–1927) Hebrew essayist and thinker

Source: Wrestling with Zion, pp. 14-15.

Life, People, Mountain, Understanding

“Since the law prohibits the keeping of wild animals and I get no enjoyment from pets, I prefer to remain unmarried.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

Law, Animals

“I've never minded being disciplined. I'd always rather have a quiet evening in than go to a wild party. Discipline for me has always been the foundation which leaves me free to fly.”

Julie Andrews (1935) British actress, singer, author, theatre director, and dancer

Woman & Home (July 2000)

Flying

“Kerchak was dead.
Withdrawing the knife that had so often rendered him master of far mightier muscles than his own, Tarzan of the Apes placed his foot upon the neck of his vanquished enemy, and once again, loud through the forest rang the fierce, wild cry of the conqueror.
And thus came the young Lord Greystoke into the kingship of the Apes.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 11 : "King of the Apes"

Cry, Dead

“Those who expect from a people like the Hindus a species of composition of precisely the same character as the historical works of Greece and Rome commit the very gregarious error of overlooking the peculiarities which distinguish the natives of India from all other races, and which strongly discriminate their intellectual productions of every kind from those of the West. Their philosophy, their poetry, their architecture, are marked with traits of originality; and the same may be expected to pervade their history, which, like the arts enumerated, took a character from its intimate association with the religion of the people. It must be recollected, moreover,… that the chronicles of all the polished nations of Europe, were, at a much more recent date, as crude, as wild, and as barren, as those of the early Rajputs.” … “My own animadversions upon the defective condition of the annals of Rajwarra have more than once been checked by a very just remark: ‘When our princes were in exile, driven from hold to hold, and compelled to dwell in the clefts of the mountains, often doubtful whether they would not be forced to abandon the very meal preparing for them, was that a time to think of historical records?’ ”… “If we consider the political changes and convulsions which have happened in Hindustan since Mahmood’s invasion, and the intolerant bigotry of many of his successors, we shall be able to account for the paucity of its national works on history, without being driven to the improbable conclusion, that the Hindus were ignorant of an art which has been cultivated in other countries from almost the earliest ages. Is it to be imagined that a nation so highly civilized as the Hindus, amongst whom the exact sciences flourished in perfection, by whom the fine arts, architecture, sculpture, poetry, music, were not only cultivated, but taught and defined by the nicest and most elaborate rules, were totally unacquainted with the simple art of recording the events of their history, the character of their princes and the acts of their reigns?”

James Tod (1782–1835) 1782-1835, English officer of the British East India Company and an Oriental scholar

[The fact appears to be that] “After eight centuries of galling subjection to conquerors totally ignorant of the classical language of the Hindus; after every capital city had been repeatedly stormed and sacked by barbarous, bigoted, and exasperated foes; it is too much to expect that the literature of the country should not have sustained, in common with other interests, irretrievable losses.”
James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Routledge and Kegan Paul (London,l829,1957), 2 vols., I quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

People, Age, Religion, Art

“All things are connected with all things throughout the universe, from the insect to the archangel; from the sand-grain to the mountain and the globe; from the dew-drop to the ocean; from the rain-drop to the rainbow; from the pebble on the shore to 'the sun that blazes in the firmament; from the zephyr that sings among the flowers of the field to the ocean that pours its wild bass in the great anthem of nature. Not only are all things connected with all things, but there is a concatenation of events, so that the character and effects of no one event can terminate in itself. As each event owes some portion of its nature to that which preceded it, so it imparts some of its nature to that which succeeds it, and thus perpetuates the blended good or evil of itself and its predecessors. The single event may thus live on in its influence along the line of all the ages, assuming new shapes, or if clothing itself in the drapery of new events, ever marching onward and upward in the continually growing affairs of time.”

John Lanahan (1815–1903)

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 611.

Age, Mountain, Flowers, Nature

“In the season of white wild roses
We two went hand in hand:
But now in the ruddy autumn
Together already we stand.”

Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–1897) English poet and critic

"A Song of Spring and Autumn".

Autumn, Season

“Then the white man hates him [the Native American], and hunts him down like the wild beasts of the forest, and so the red-crayon sketch is rubbed out, and the canvas is ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God's own image.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

"The Pilgrims of Plymouth" http://www.unz.org/Pub/BrainerdCephas-1901v02-00267 (Oration, December 22, 1855), in Cephas Brainerd and Eveline Warner Brainerd (eds), The New England Society Orations: Volume II. New York: The Century Co., 1901, p. 298.

God, Hate

“Moves like a fist through traffic,
Anger and no-one can kill it,
Shoves a little bump to the momentum,
It's just a little lump but you feel it
In the creases and the shadows,
With a rattling deep emotion.
The cool, cool river
Sweeps the wild, wide ocean.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

The Cool, Cool River
Song lyrics, The Rhythm of the Saints (1990)

Feeling, Anger

“Just as work is the curse of the drinking classes of this country," [Wilde] said laughing, "so education is the curse of the acting classes.”

Frank Harris (1856–1931) Irish journalist and rogue

Oscar Wilde (1916) ch. 11.

Education, Drink, Country

“You’ve been a father to me.
Your 1960’s speak.
Gives me comatose joy like re-run TV.
While the mountainside was shining.
Wild colors of my destiny”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

Cape Cañaveral
Conor Oberst (2008)

Color, Joy

“Hurja poika: The grave of the wild one is deep and black. You get chilly waiting for the resurrection.”

Pauli Hanhiniemi (1964) Finnish musician and composer

Waiting

“My familiar spirit is like an old wild turkey that forsakes a feeding ground as soon as it sees tracks of people-especially if the people are readers, book-buyers. It's a crafty bird and it wants to go where there aint no readers That's the truth: they go and paw a place all up and spoil it for me. It isn't my secret anymore.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher (27 February 1924), published in The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (2013), edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout

People, Truth, Secret, Books

“More and more violently, with the impotent rage of the wild beast, who wishes to maintain in the backyards of all her colonial possession, each and every sinecure upon which the American way of life was erected. Let them take heed, those sons of the Pentagon and of North American monopolies who until now have paraded their arrogance up down the lands of America… Cuba is no longer a solitary island… defended only by the vulnerable breasts of her sons… Cuba is now, in addition, a proud Caribbean island defended by the missiles of the greatest military power in history.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

As quoted in Venceremos! The Speeches and Writings of Ernesto Che Guevara (1968) by John Gerassi, p. 109-110

Life, Way, History, Rage

“Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Different Seasons (1982), Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

Departure, Bird, Past, Parting

“Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,
Do not forget what flowers
The great boar trampled down in ivy time.
Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,
Her sea-blue eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not performed.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"To Juan at the Winter Solstice," lines 37–42, from Poems 1938-1945 (1946).
Poems

Smile, Flowers, Time, Sea

“Suppose any person to be put in possession of a large estate of fruitful land, with rich beds of gold in its gravel; countless herds of cattle in its pastures; houses, and gardens, and storehouses full of useful stores; but suppose, after all, that he could get no servants? In order that he may be able to have servants, some one in his neighbourhood must be poor, and in want of his gold — or his corn. Assume that no one is in want of either, and that no servants are to be had. He must, therefore, bake his own bread, make his own clothes, plough his own ground, and shepherd his own flocks. His gold will be as useful to him as any other yellow pebbles on his estate. His stores must rot, for he cannot consume them. He can eat no more than another man could eat, and wear no more than another man could wear. He must lead a life of severe and common labour to procure even ordinary comforts; he will be ultimately unable to keep either houses in repair, or fields in cultivation; and forced to content himself with a poor man's portion of cottage and garden, in the midst of a desert of waste land, trampled by wild cattle, and encumbered by ruins of palaces, which he will hardly mock at himself by calling "his own."”

John Ruskin book Unto This Last

Essay II: "The Veins of Wealth," section 29.
Unto This Last (1860)

Life, Housing, Personality, Clothes

“In the last sweep of love, they pass over fields
Behind the aerodrome, where boys play all day
Hacking dead grass: whose cries, like wild birds
Settle upon the nearest roofs
But soon are hid under the loud city.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"The Landscape near an Aerodrome"
Poems (1933)

Love, Boy, Bird, Grass

“Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Success

“To thy lover, O Lord, the railing of the world is wild honey and the pelting of stones by the mob is summer rain on the body. For is it not Thou that railest and peltest, and is it not Thou in the stones that strikest and hurtest me?”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Bhakti

World, Lovers, Summer

“It's the wild, wild West of baseball, and it just keeps getting wilder.”

Joe Kehoskie (1973) American baseball agent

Discussing the business of Cuban baseball defectors, from the Boston Globe article "Hardball" http://apse.dallasnews.com/contest/2000/writing/all.investigative.third1.html by Steve Fainaru and Shira Springer (28 May 2000)

“Those that merely talk and never think,
That live in the wild anarchy of drink.”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

XLVII, An Epistle, Answering to One That Asked to Be Sealed of the Tribe of Ben, lines 9-10. Comparable to: "They never taste who always drink; They always talk who never think", Matthew Prior, Upon a passage in the Scaligerana.
The Works of Ben Jonson, Second Folio (1640), Underwoods

Drink, Thinking

“No matter where I go in the world, although I can't speak any foreign language, I don't feel out of place. I think of the earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice just how foolish international friction is, and they would put an end to it. We are, after all, at a point where it is almost narrow-minded to think merely in geocentric terms. Human beings have launched satellites into outer space, and yet they still grovel on earth looking at their own feet like wild dogs. What is to become of our planet?”

Akira Kurosawa book Something Like an Autobiography

Something Like an Autobiography (1981)

People, World, Dogs, Way

“Through torrid tracts with fainting steps they go,
Where wild Altama murmurs to their woe.”

Oliver Goldsmith The Deserted Village

Source: The Deserted Village (1770), Line 344.

“Open your arms in the early mornin'
When the light comes shinin' through
Can't you hear my heart beat just for you?
It's beating so wild, honey.
And light comes shinin'
Singin' my song
And the band is playin'
And the music is tried and true.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Wild Honey
Song lyrics, Common One (1980)

Music, Light, Heart

“There was a time indeed when it was not so, when the bold mariner, Roger Williams, sailed beyond the Boston Light of two centuries ago, and asked of the wilds of the Seekonk and the Mawshawsuc, 'What cheer? What cheer?' And the friendly solitudes answered, 'A truer liberty than you left behind'. And if Boston Light cheers the world to-day it is because the spirit of Roger Williams feeds the flame.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

World, Solitude, Light, Time

“What a strange page in human history is that of social distinction; no people so savage but they have a sort of fashion. Even among the wild people in whose country I am now writing, there are all the small distinctions of small gentility — for example, it is not "comme il faut to wear silk."”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

No.18. The Monastery — MYSIE HAPPER.
Literary Remains

People, History, Fashion, Country

“I guess that I'm just a plain wild dude.”

Lawrence Taylor (1959) All-American college football player, professional football player, linebacker, Pro Football Hall of Fame member

Source: Whitley, David. L.T. was reckless and magnificent http://espn.go.com/classic/biography/s/Taylor_Lawrence.html, espn.com, accessed April 2, 2007.

“I'm in the Lord's hands,' he said humbly. 'I'm but a penny whistle for His breath to blow on.' This he said with such solemnity that the meaning of a fanatic was suddenly revealed to me. One or two distorted notions, a wild imagination, and fierce passions, and there you have the ingredients ready.”

John Buchan book Salute to Adventurers

Source: Salute to Adventurers (1915), Ch. 3 "The Canongate Tollbooth"

Imagination, Passion

“This was a solitary walk where the sun and the scents of wild flowers would act on a tortured mind like a soothing drug.”

Lindsey Davis book See Delphi and Die

See Delphi and Die

Flowers, Sun

“As long as men, in their aberration ("aberration", Fr.), will go out of their way ("s'ingénieront", Fr.) in every manners ("de toutes manières", Fr.) to harm and torment each others, it is an urgent duty, for those who are conscious of the absurdity of such a state of affairs, to strive to put them in the picture about (or throw light on) their wildness”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

"égarements", Fr.
Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 38.

Men, Way, Light

“Do you, do you like dreaming of things
so impossible or only the practical
or ever the wild or waiting through all your bad bad days
just to end them with
someone you care about
and do you like making out
and long drives and brown eyes
and guys that just
don't quite fit in”

Chris Carrabba (1975) American musician

So Impossible

Dreams, Guy, Waiting

“And pomp, and feast, and revelry,
With mask, and antique pageantry,
Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.
Then to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonson's learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild,
And ever, against eating cares,
Lap me in soft Lydian airs,
Married to immortal verse
Such as the meeting soul may pierce,
In notes with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Source: L'Allegro (1631), Line 127; comparable to: "Wisdom married to immortal verse", William Wordsworth, The Excursion, book vii

Youth, Dreams, Soul, Learning

“It shock'd me first to see the sun
Shine gladly o'er thy tomb;
To see the wild flowers o'er it run
In such luxuriant bloom.
Now I feel glad that they should keep
A bright sweet watch above thy sleep.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Forgotten One from The Keepsake, 1831 [Probably refers to Letitia’s little sister, Elizabeth]
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Feeling, Flowers, Sleep, Sun

“My specter around me night and day
Like a wild beast guards my way,
My emanation far within
Weeps incessantly for my sin.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

My Specter, st. 1
1800s, Poems from Blake's Notebook (c. 1804)

Way, Night

“As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Maypole of Merry Mount

"The Maypole of Merry Mount" (1836) from Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1851)

World, Sadness, Home

“The fact is, growing hemp for industrial purposes would make it a very useful plant. It can be a fiber for clothing, a source of paper, even an alternative fuel. Canada is already using hemp this way. I simply don't see that cannabis grows wild on earth just so humans can eradicate it.
Of course, the work of eradicating marijuana creates jobs within law enforcement. If we made it legal, and taxed it like we do tobacco and alcohol, maybe those law enforcement people could start paying more attention to murders and terrorism. I also think it's time for people to rise up against the prescription drug industry, the biggest opponent of legalization. You have to remember that they don't want anything out there that they can't make a profit from. Marijuana is a weed, and that means you can grow it, essentially free. This doesn't sit well with the pharmaceutical industry, and I think our Food and Drug Administration is nothing but a puppet whose strings the industry pulls.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 10 (p. 190)

People, Alcohol, Law, Food

“I want there to be woodcock forever flying over in October, and solitude, and Hunter’s Moons. But most, I want there always to be Grouse- of all wild things, the wildest- in these endless mountains we call home.”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

The Upland Shooting Life (1971)

Home, Mountain, Solitude, Flying

“It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder--from what I've since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rockings of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

People, Disease, Thinking, Suffering

“Oscar Wilde: 'I wish I had said that'
Whistler: 'You will, Oscar, you will.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

Source: posthumous published, L.C. Ingleby, Oscar Wilde (1907). This is a paraphrased version of the quotation that has come to be accepted. For a chronology of sources see Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/05/oscar-will/.

“Past the flannel plains and the blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a. m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscatine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

The Pale King (2011)

Tree, Grass, Water, Past

“By and large, horror fiction is the most difficult to domesticate because part of the point is that it's one step ahead – or behind – everybody else's taste. And I'm not really convinced I'd like it to change. There's something very healthy about horror fiction being always a little bit on the outside. It's the wild-dog genre.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

The Advocate (Feb. 21, 1995)

Dogs, Change, Parting

“The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! … Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lectures VI and VII, "The Sick Soul"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Life, Feeling, Cats, Bird

“I came to understand why animals have horns. It was the incomprehensibility that could not be contained within their lives, a wild and obsessive caprice, their ill-judged and blind obstinacy. Some idée fixe—grown beyond the borders of their being and high above their heads, suddenly brought into the light—had solidified into palpable, hard matter. There, it had assumed its wild, incalculable, and incredible shape, twisted into a fantastical arabesque, invisible to their eyes, but dreadful nonetheless, the unknown numeral under whose menace they lived. I understood why those animals were disposed to ill-judged and wild panic, to startled frenzy. Herded into their mania, they could not extricate themselves from the knot of those horns, and so, lowering their heads, they looked out sadly and wildly from between them as if trying to find a pathway through their branches.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“The Brilliant Epoch” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium/epoch1.htm <br class="br">His father, Living things

Understanding, Light, Animals

“The nationalist and imperialist delusions that run through all this document are far more wild than any idealist dreams of the future that we hold. But we say that if there is this menace, it is not going to be met by any policy of alliances. It is not going to be met by attack. We loath and detest the military spirit, the tyrannical spirit which has shown itself all over the world. You will never beat this by attack; you will only beat it by putting something far bigger in its place.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1935/mar/11/defence in the House of Commons (11 March 1935) on the National Government's White Paper on Defence <br class="br">1930s

World, Dreams, Future

“When Tibet was invaded by the Chinese Red Army in October 1950, the explanation which Peking put forward was: "Anglo-American imperialism and their running dog Nehru were plotting a coup for the annexation of Tibet." The only reaction from Pandit Nehru was to start apologising for Peking immediately…. A few days later, the Prime Minister did something infinitely worse. Speaking on Foreign Affairs in the Rajya Sabha on September 23, he denounced and threatened the organisers of the Tibet Day in a language which was wild…. This statement was full of insinuations. Here was the Prime Minister of a democratic country showing extreme intolerance for, and interfering publicly with other people's freedom to think and express opinion about matters which concerned the security of the nation.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Genesis and Growth of Nehruism (1993)

People, Dogs, Thinking, Freedom