Wildness Quotes

If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!

We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by thehuman voice,--take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,--which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the Ranz des Vaches for them.

The most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants.

As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented.

To see wild life you must go forth at wild season.

I once dated a girl that was wild. She was so wild that one night she gave her phone number to the mechanical bull.

Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society. Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level.

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wildness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wild man in her, became extinct.

All good things are wild and free.

There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

I want a trouble-maker for a lover, Blood spiller, blood drinker, a heart of flame, Who quarrels with the sky and fights with fate, Who burns like fire on the rushing sea.

The best poets, after all, exhibit only a tame and civil side of nature. They have not seen the west side of any mountain.

Whatever has not come under the sway of man is wild. In this sense original and independent men are wild - not tamed and broken by society.

I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me.

It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every State which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the Northern forests who were.

I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back.

What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own.

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.

... Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.

We need the tonic of wildness.

A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earnedin the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours.

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild, and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World

Life consists with Wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest trees.

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador a greater wildness than in some recess of Concord.

What youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside.

I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves.

A fly is as untamable as a hyena.

I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.

The most alive is the wildest.

Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure.

It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in the woods.