#wilderness

To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality without a name. There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. ↗

— Christopher Alexander

#cannot #central #criterion #first #know

The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples. ↗

— Walter Lippmann

#america #conquest #different #fifty #great

Save for thee and thy lessons, man in society would everywhere sink into a sad compound of the fiend and the wild beast; and this fallen world would be as certainly a moral as a natural wilderness. ↗

— Hugh Miller

#certainly #compound #everywhere #fallen #fiend

When you are facing the wilderness on your own, you have a totally different attitude to someone who works in government or who has a monthly cheque. ↗

— Rick Santelli

#cheque #different #different attitude #facing #government

If we are to have a culture as resilient and competent in the face of necessity as it needs to be, then it must somehow involve within itself a ceremonious generosity toward the wilderness of natural force and instinct. The farm must yield a place to the forest, not as a wood lot, or even as a necessary agricultural principle but as a sacred grove - a place where the Creation is let alone, to serve as instruction, example, refuge; a place for people to go, free of work and presumption, to let themselves alone. (pg. 125, The Body and the Earth) ↗

— Wendell Berry

#nature #refuge #solitude #wilderness #art

Maybe freedom really is nothing left to lose. You had it once in childhood, when it was okay to climb a tree, to paint a crazy picture and wipe out on your bike, to get hurt. The spirit of risk gradually takes its leave. It follows the wild cries of joy and pain down the wind, through the hedgerow, growing ever fainter. What was that sound? A dog barking far off? That was our life calling to us, the one that was vigorous and undefended and curious. ↗

— Peter Heller

#outdoors #risk #wilderness #freedom

I own a crevice stuffed with moss and a couch of lemming fur; I sit and listen to the music of water dripping on a distant stone. Or I sing to myself of stealth and loneliness No one comes to see me but I hear outside the scratching of claws, the warm, inquisitive breath … (from 'The Hermitage') ↗

— John Meade Haines

#wilderness #music

The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver--over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a somber gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself. I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace. What were we who had strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing that couldn't talk, and perhaps was deaf as well. What was in there? ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#nature #wilderness #nature

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. ↗

— Alan Alda

#city #comfort #creative #else #ever

Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness. ↗

— Kate DiCamillo

#books #every #guides #light #me