Quotes about wilderness
A collection of quotes on the topic of wilderness, world, likeness, use.
Quotes about wilderness

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse — and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
FitzGerald's first edition (1859)
A book, a woman, and a flask of wine:
The three make heaven for me; it may be thine
Is some sour place of singing cold and bare —
But then, I never said thy heaven was mine.
As translated by Richard Le Gallienne (1897)
Give me a flagon of red wine, a book of verses, a loaf of bread, and a little idleness. If with such store I might sit by thy dear side in some lonely place, I should deem myself happier than a king in his kingdom.
As translated by Justin McCarthy (1888).
The Rubaiyat (1120)
“If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.”
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)
“Wilderness. The word itself is music.”
Source: Desert Solitaire
"Down the River", p. 148
Desert Solitaire (1968)

During a party after municipal elections ( video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaRxCHXuoLA) (19 March 2014), quoted in Aljazeera: Dutch far-right in crisis over Wilders chant (22 March 2014) http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2014/03/dutch-far-right-crisis-over-wilders-chant-2014322143319384578.html
2010s

Ch. 2.

“O Love! in such a wilderness as this.”
Part III, stanza 1
Gertrude of Wyoming (1809)

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse — and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
FitzGerald's first edition (1859).
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

“I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.”
“What a comfort one familiar face is in a howling wilderness of strangers!”
Source: Anne of the Island (1915), Ch. 3

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

“Sometimes a wild horse needs to feel that his rider is just a little bit wilder.”
Source: Ruby

“Wisconsin: Marshland Elegy”, p. 101.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Wisconsin: Marshland Elegy," "Wisconsin: The Sand Counties" "Wisconsin: On a Monument to the Pigeon," and "Wisconsin: Flambeau"
Source: A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
Context: To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs. A roadless marsh is seemingly as worthless to the alphabetical conservationist as an undrained one was to the empire-builders. Solitude, the one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognized as valuable only by ornithologists and cranes.
Thus always does history, whether of marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
July 1890, page 313
John of the Mountains, 1938
“I am the wilderness lost in man.”

“My heart, the bird of the wilderness, has found its sky in your eyes.”
31
The Gardener http://www.spiritualbee.com/love-poems-by-tagore/ (1915)
You Are An American http://psstpsstpsst1.blogspot.com/2005/08/you-are-american.html.

Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques (published 1782)

Vol. I, Ch. 11: Of the Times of the Birth and Passion of Christ
Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733)

Vol. I, Ch. 13: Of the King who did according to his will, and magnified himself above every God, and honored Mahuzzims, and regarded not the desire of women
Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733)

“Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.”
Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Wilderness", p. 188.

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 592.

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn
Context: It's with us only that they make battles. It is we who are the material of war. War is made up of the flesh and the souls of common soldiers only. It is we who make the plains of dead and the rivers of blood, all of us, and each of us is invisible and silent because of the immensity of our numbers. The emptied towns and the villages destroyed, they are a wilderness of our making. Yes, war is all of us, and all of us together.

“Till the wilderness cried aloud,
A secret between you two,
Between the proud and the proud.”
Against Unworthy Praise http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1433/
The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)
Context: p>O heart, be at peace, because
Nor knave nor dolt can break
What's not for their applause
Being for a woman's sake.
Enough if the work has seemed,
So did she your strength renew,
A dream that a lion had dreamed
Till the wilderness cried aloud,
A secret between you two,
Between the proud and the proud.What, still you would have their praise!
But here's a haughtier text,
The labyrinth of her days
That her own strangeness perplexed;
And how what her dreaming gave
Earned slander, ingratitude,
From self-same dolt and knave;
Aye, and worse wrong than these.
Yet she, singing upon her road,
Half lion, half child, is at peace.</p

Source: Presidents of India, 1950-2003, P.135
“There was French kissing, and then there was Cajun French kissing. Spicier, harder, wilder.”
Source: Endless Knight

" The Yellowstone National Park http://books.google.com/books?id=smQCAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA509", The Atlantic Monthly, volume LXXXI, number 486 (April 1898) pages 509-522 (at pages 515-516); modified slightly and reprinted in Our National Parks http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/our_national_parks/ (1901), chapter 2: The Yellowstone National Park
1900s, Our National Parks (1901)

“One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.”
Source: The Dharma Bums
“Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.”
Source: The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975)

" Inversnaid http://www.bartleby.com/122/33.html, lines 13-16
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Complete Poems

“There is a wilderness we walk alone
However well-companioned”
Source: Western Star

“When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.”
Source: The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year
Source: The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader
Source: Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
“The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.”
"Shadows from the Big Woods", p. 223
The Journey Home (1977)
Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960)
Source: The Sound of Mountain Water

Lonesome Traveler (1960)
Context: No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. Learning for instance, to eat when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy.

1920s, Address at the Black Hills (1927)

Excerpt from speech delivered at the 74th commencement of the Albany Law School on June 10, 1925, which is reproduced on a gigantic plaque on the west side (facing the setting sun, as if to say, "Go West, young man.") of the UC Berkeley School of Law's main building, Boalt Hall.
Other writings

1860s, Speech in the House of Representatives (1866)

"Game and Wild Life Conservation" [1932]; Published in The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott (eds.) 1991, p. 165-166.
1930s

2000s, Europe's Anti-American Obsession (2003)

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 313.

1950s, Address at the Philadelphia Convention Hall (1956)

attributed to a Muir "manuscript" in Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (1945), page 124
Similar to statements from My First Summer in the Sierra http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/my_first_summer_in_the_sierra/, see quotes from 30 August and 2 September above.
1870s

“You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour.”
Herzog on Herzog (2002)
"The Heart of Noon", p. 116
Desert Solitaire (1968)

Source: The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1900, p. 5-6

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 399.
“It's the wild, wild West of baseball, and it just keeps getting wilder.”
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)

Babe Cristabel, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

1860s, Speech in the House of Representatives (1866)

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)

On filming Buddy Buddy. p. 299
Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996)

letter http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/AldoLeopold/AldoLeopold-idx?type=turn&id=AldoLeopold.ALCorresAK&entity=AldoLeopold.ALCorresAK.p0597&isize=XL to Wallace Grange, 3 January 1948.
1940s
“God sifted a whole nation that he might send choice grain over into this wilderness.”
Election Sermon at Boston, April 29, 1669. Compare: "God had sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for this planting", Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Courtship of Miles Standish, iv.