Alone In The Wilderness Quotes & Sayings

The contemplative man always lives alone. Regardless of who may reside in his home, his is a solitary world. — Daniel J. Rice

We may also conceive of the evolution of humanity as a vast army, toiling slowly along its line of march in a great column; and, scouting far ahead of the main body, solitary outriders, swift-mounted, light-armed and without baggage, exploring the way for the rest; spiritual guerrillas, whom Paul referred to as those born out of due season. From time to time we shall see some swift-footed soul draw ahead of the great army of mankind and push on alone into the wilderness. For a period his path is solitary, but presently he catches up with the far-flung line of the scouts, and if able to give the password that proves him to be of their body, is given his place in the ranks of that adventurous company, a boundary-rider of evolution, alone on patrol, yet not out of touch with his comrades, for there are signaling-points along the line, and at certain seasons all gather in to the council. — Dion Fortune

It is you I have been able to love, you alone in all the world. You can have no idea of what that means. It means a spring in the desert, a blossoming tree in the wilderness. — Hermann Hesse

Men are indeed wretched ... Everything beautiful happens without them. Cholera and catchwords are what they make. The foam with jealousy or die of boredom, which comes down to the same thing, if they're not allowed to interfere. And whenever they do interfere, there's a premium on hypocrisy and raving. One need only be up here o in the wilderness that I rode through the other day, to realize where the true battles lie, to become very particular about the victories one strives for. In short, to cease being content with little. As soon as you're alone, things lay hold of you by themselves and always force you to take the roads that are hardest to climb. And even if you don't get there, what fine views you have, and how reassuring everything is. — Jean Giono

Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without governing,every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will,can such a form of so-called Government continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there. — Thomas Carlyle

Her name was Melanie Stryder. She was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was in Los Angeles when the occupation became known to her, and she hid in the wilderness for a few years before finding ... Hmmm. Sorry, I'll try that one again later. The body has seen twenty years. She drove to Chicago from ... " I shook my head. "There were several stages, not all of them alone. The vehicle was stolen. She was searching for a cousin named Sharon, whom she had reason to hope was still human. She neither found nor contacted anyone before she was spotted. But ... " I struggled, fighting against another blank wall. "I think ... I can't be sure ... I think she left a note ... somewhere. — Stephenie Meyer

It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, and through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in fury of abhorrence and fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant;
the old bear, solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowered childless and absolved of mortality
old Priam reft of his old wife and outlived all his sons. — William Faulkner

This is the first time I have met someone who seeks out people and who sees beyond ... We never look beyond our assumptions and, what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves. We don't recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were to become aware of the fact that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy ... As for me, I implore fate to give me the chance to see beyond myself and truly meet someone. — Muriel Barbery

We don't recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were able to become aware of the fact that we are only ever looking at ourselves in the other person, that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy. — Muriel Barbery

She had the top down and I could smell everything in those woods, and you know what an old fine smell that is, like something which has been mostly left alone and is not much troubled.
("Mrs. Todd's Shortcut") — Stephen King

Jesus took care of himself. He ate healthy food. He rested when he was weary. He sought time alone when he needed to recharge. He laughed with his friends. He wept when he was sad. He walked long distances and climbed hills and moved. From barren wilderness to unpredictable waters, he spent the majority of his time outside in nature. He loved wholeheartedly. He served others. He cooked. He studied and learned and grew in wisdom. Jesus cared for himself physically, mentally and spiritually.
To be aligned with him, we must do no less. — Toni Sorenson

During these years in the small-talk wilderness, I also wondered why Americans valued friendliness with commerce so much. Was handing over cash the sacred rite of American capitalism - and of American life? On a day that I don't spend money in America, I feel oddly depressed. It's my main form of social interaction - as it is for millions of Americans who live alone or away from their families. — Karan Mahajan

Hm-m," he said. "Lookie, Ma. I been all day an' all night hidin' alone. Guess who
I been thinkin' about? Casy! He talked a lot. Used ta bother me. But now I been thinkin' what he said, an' I can remember-
all of it. Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an' he foun' he didn' have no soul that was his'n. Says he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good, 'cause his little piece of a soul wasn't no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole. Funny how I remember. Didn't even think I was listenin'. But I know now a fella ain't no good alone. — John Steinbeck

French Louis Seymour of the West Canada Creek, who knew how to survive all alone in a treacherous wilderness, and Mr. Alfred G. Vanderbilt of New York City and Raquette Lake, who was richer than God and traveled in his very own Pullman car, and Emmie Hubbard of the Uncas Road, who painted the most beautiful pictures when she was drunk and burned them in her woodstove when she was sober, were all ten times more interesting to me than Milton's devil or Austen's boy-crazy girls or that twitchy fool of Poe's who couldn't think of any place better to bury a body than under his own damn floor. — Jennifer Donnelly

For a century, environmentalism has divided itself into warring camps: conservationists versus preservationists.... The struggle pits those who would meddle with nature against those who would leave it be.... The only sensible way forward lies in a melding of the two philosophies. If nature has grown artificial, then restoring wilderness requires human intervention. We must manage nature in order to leave it alone. — David Baron

Even the wisest of mankind cannot live by reason alone; pure arrogant reason, denying the claims of prejudice (which commonly are also the claims of conscience), leads to a wasteland of withered hopes and crying loneliness, empty of God and man: the wilderness in which Satan tempted Christ was not more dreadful than the arid expanse of intellectual vanity deprived of tradition and intuition, where modern man is tempted by his own pride. — Russell Kirk

When you're in the wild, there's nothing to hide behind. No bars or credit cards or movie theatres or cell phones or credentials or security. You're just alone with yourself. You look around and lose yourself in the mountains, rivers, forests or tundra, but you can see nothing except for the chaos in your own mind. It is fucking terrifying and peaceful at the same time. — Shannon Mullen

When you are alone in the wilderness, opinions or beliefs of any kind are dropped as the absurd accoutrements they are. But after being in the wilderness for a while, you may come around to feeling sociable. Maybe you could try living in a community of "like-minded" social deviants. However, they had better be so alike that they are clones of one another or the day will come when someone steps over the line and factions begin to teem. Our brains will always discriminate - that is their nature. They fix on superficial differences we spy in one another, redundantly speaking, since all differences among us are superficial. — Thomas Ligotti

What sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it's dangerous (it's almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it's solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). it's that five miles out in the woods you can't buy anything. — Bill McKibben

What are the temples which Roman robbers have reared, - what are the towers in which feudal oppression has fortified itself...to the deep forests which the eye of God has alone pervaded, and where Nature, in her unviolated sanctuary, has for ages laid her fruits and flowers on His altar! What is the echo of roofs...or or aisles that pealed the anthems of painted pomp, to the silence that has reigned in these dim groves since the first fiat of Creation was spoken. — Charles Fenno Hoffman

... I never understood until the past months why the Master so often withdrew alone into the wilderness. There is not only food and medicine for one's body; there is also healing for the heart and strength for the soul in nature. One gets very close to God ... in these temples of God's own building. — Harold Bell Wright

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter. — John Muir

I didn't know how living outdoors and sleeping on the ground in a tent each night and walking alone through the wilderness all day almost every day had come to feel like my normal life, but it had. It was the idea of not doing it that scared me. — Cheryl Strayed

To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love him. — Frederick Buechner

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day-
A sunny day with the leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play
Your first game of fotball, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
with the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.
I had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show-
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love proved in the letting go. — Cecil Day-Lewis

If you have ever been lost in a wilderness, treated unjustly, dealt with harshly, or have fled in fear or in the hope of something better, Hagar's story is for you. It is evidence of God's abiding grace, no matter what. You aren't alone. The Lord sees you. He hears. He knows. He is with you. His grace will comfort you. It's not unusual to feel as if you are caught like a prisoner in your life. At times you may wonder if something or someone out there is better than what you have now. That's a common temptation for every human since the garden. But is what you must endure right now unbearable? Deep down, if you're honest, you know that God is right there with you, even if your situation is uncomfortable, discouraging, or unfair. He is accomplishing his plan for you. His comfort is available. His hope is good. Even in the confines of your situation, an abiding grace resides. — Robin Jones Gunn

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

As for me, I delight in the every day Way Among mist-wrapped vines and rocky caves Here in the wilderness I am completely free With my friends, the white clouds, idling forever There are roads, but they do not reach the world Since I am mindless, who can rouse my thoughts On a bed of stone I sit, alone in the night While a round moon climbs up Cold Mountain — Hanshan

[Wild animals], and the beautiful landscapes that sustain them ... possess a value and a virtue regardless of our dwindling connection with them. It seems that there is a virtue and a wisdom in keeping some things beyond our reach: that the protection of wilderness itself is imperative ... We have touched, and are consuming, everything. The world is very old, and we are so new. I like the feeling of awe
what the late writer Wallace Stegner called 'the birth of awe'
in beholding wild country not reduced by man. I like to remember that it is wild country that gives rise to wild animals; and that the marvelous specificity of wild animals reminds us to wake up, to let our senses be inflamed by every scent and sound and sight and taste and touch of the world. I like to remember that we are not here forever, and not here alone, and that the respect with which we behold the wild world matters, if anything does. — Rick Bass

A voice alone in the wilderness is a beautiful thing. — John Arnold

...there is something which impresses the mind with awe in the shade and silence of these vast forests. In the deep solitude, alone with nature, we converse with God. — Thaddeus Mason Harris

The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created supremely valuable in the eyes of God precisely because it had no value to men. The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted by men because it offered them nothing. There was nothing to attract them. There was nothing to exploit. The desert was the region in which the Chosen People had wandered for forty years, cared for by God alone. They could have reached the Promised Land in a few months if they had traveled directly to it. God's plan was that they should learn to love Him in the wilderness and that they should always look back on the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone. The desert was created simply to be itself, not to be transformed by men into something else. — Thomas Merton

No man is competent unless he can stalk alone and armed in the wilderness. — Townsend Whelen

Every one of them has a story, and every story begins with a man who failed her. A husband who came home from the war, good for nothin' but drink. A father who didn't come home at all, or a stepfather who did. A brother who should have protected her. A beau who promised marriage and left when he got what he wanted, because he wouldn't marry a slut. If a girl like that has lost her way, it's-because some worthless no-account-sonofabitch left her in the wilderness alone! — Mary Doria Russell

Humans who spend time in the wilderness, alone, without man-made mechanical noise around them, often discover that their brain begins to recover its ability to discern things. — Robert Anderson

For the first time after so many years I come back to cry aloud in the desert. Because this is the mission of the intellectual who is truly a prophet - to cry in the desert. The greatest of the prophets, Isaiah, made it notable, of course, when he spoke of himself as the voice of one "crying in the wilderness." Because the mission of the intellectual is to be the man who, from his desert, his basic solitude - and man is only man amid his truth, only himself when he is alone - cries aloud to others and invites them to each into his own solitude. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

It is one thing to die. It is another thing for an innocent person to die for a guilty one. It is something much more that Jesus would take on himself all the curses the world deserved in concentrated form. This meant that his relationship with his Father, the one thing that had sustained him throughout all the previous insults and rejection, was about to be removed. Moses knew he could not lead the people through the wilderness unless God was present. Without his Father's grace and mercy, Jesus had to wonder if he would be able to take one more step, let alone make it all the way to the cross. So he prayed. The result was that he was strengthened. His mission came into full view (John 18:11), and he was able to see the divine plan to the end. From that point on, the gospel accounts communicate two unmistakable points. They press these points until we are undone by them: Jesus experienced incomparable shame, and he experienced it at the hands of everyone. — Edward T. Welch

All at once
A fresher wind sweeps by, and breaks my dream,
And I am in the wilderness alone. — William Cullen Bryant

The thrill of tramping alone and unafraid through a wilderness of lakes, creeks, alpine meadows, and glaciers is not known to many. A civilization can be built around the machine but it is doubtful that a meaningful life can be produced by it ... When man worships at the feet of avalas creations. When he feels the wind blowing through him on a high peak or sleeps under a closely matted white bark pine in an exposed basin, he is apt to find his relationship to the universe. — William O. Douglas

If you spend time alone in the wilderness, you get very attuned to living things. — George Dyson

The encrusted religious structure is not changed by its institutional dependents--they are part of the crust. It is changed by one who goes alone to the wilderness, where he fasts and prays, and returns with cleansed vision. In going alone, he goes independent of institutions, forswearing orthodoxy ("right opinion"). In going to the wilderness he goes to the margin, where he is surrounded by the possibilities--by no means all good--that orthodoxy has excluded. By fasting he disengages his thoughts from the immediate issues of livelihood; his willing hunger takes his mind off the payroll, so to speak. And by praying he acknowledges ignorance; the orthodox presume to know, whereas the marginal person is trying to find out. He returns to the community, not necessarily with new truth, but with a new vision of the truth; he sees it more whole than before. — Wendell Berry

It would be a hard life, but it would be theirs alone. Here at the world's edge, far from everything familiar and safe, they would build a new home in the wilderness and do it as partners. — Eowyn Ivey

Because I feared I couldn't walk to Newton Centre without her, I needed to hike through desert, snow and woods alone.

Childhood is a wilderness. — Aspen Matis

Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into. — Wendell Berry

I suppose each of us has his own fantasy of how he wants to die. I would like to go out in a blaze of glory, myself, or maybe simply disappear someday, far out in the heart of the wilderness I love, all by myself, alone with the Universe and whatever God may happen to be looking on. Disappear - and never return. That's my fantasy. — Edward Abbey

It can be frightening to spend 5 weeks alone in a cabin in the wilderness. I was able to collect my thoughts and worked a lot - because I couldn't do anything else. — Wanda Koop

In the writings of a recluse one always hears something of the echo of the wilderness, something of the murmuring tones and timid vigilance of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry itself, there sounds a new and more dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. He who has sat day and night, from year's end to year's end, alone with his soul in familiar discord and discourse, he who has become a cave-bear, or a treasure-seeker, or a treasure-guardian and dragon in his cave - it may be a labyrinth, but can also be a gold-mine - his ideas themselves eventually acquire a twilight-colour of their own, and an odour, as much of the depth as of the mould, something uncommunicative and repulsive, which blows chilly upon every passer-by. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Every calling is marked by a season of insignificance, a period when nothing seems to make sense. This is a time of wandering in the wilderness, when you feel alone and misunderstood. To the outsider, such a time looks like failure, as if you are grasping at air or simply wasting time. But the reality is this is the most important experience a person can have if they make the most of it. — Jeff Goins

There are a few things in life so beautiful they hurt: swimming in the ocean while it rains, reading alone in empty libraries, the sea of stars that appear when you're miles away from the neon lights of the city, bars after 2am, walking in the wilderness, all the phases of the moon, the things we do not know about the universe, and you. — Beau Taplin

The next "I will" is in John, fourteenth chapter, verse eighteen: "I will not leave you comfortless." To me it is a sweet thought that Christ has not left us alone in this dark wilderness here below. Although — D.L. Moody

I have never had much need for companionship, unless it was the companionship of someone I could call a friend. Certainly I have seldom wished the conversation of strangers or the sight of strange faces. I believe rather that when I was alone I felt I had in some fashion lost my individuality; to the thrush and the rabbit I had been not Severian, but Man. The many people who like to be utterly alone, and particularly to be utterly alone in a wilderness, do so, I believe, because they enjoy playing that part. But I wanted to be a particular person again, and so I sought the mirror of other persons, which would show me that I was not as they were. — Gene Wolfe

I do not find myself beguiled, let alone enchanted by mortal man or woman with their pretense, show or adornments, yet when I'm alone in the pine-scented cloak of forested mountains, I'm both.

It was nearing sunset in the treasure state with not another soul in sight and despite my own plainness and insignificance, I never felt more grounded or at peace; it's a tranquility only the curvaceous, imposing landscape of the frontier can provide and I was free of the trepidation within my thoughts as I gratefully and prayerfully walked with God. All was well within me and around me for that blissful yet brief moment in time. — Donna Lynn Hope

But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad. — Joseph Conrad