Quotes & Sayings About Born To Be Wild

One walks along a street and strays unknowingly from one's path; one then looks up and suddenly for those familiar landmarks of orientation, and, seeing none, one feels lost. Panic drapes the look of the world in a strangeness, and the more one stares blankly at the world, the stranger it looks, the more hideously frightening it seems. There is then born in one a wild, hot wish to project out upon the alien world the world that one is seeking. This wish is a hunger for power, to be in command of one's self. — Richard Wright

Oh, I can picture myself rattling along Route 66 on that thing, headphones on, singing along to ZZ Top's 'Sharp Dressed Man' or the opening line from 'Born to be Wild' by Steppenwolf - 'Get your motor running ... ' The trike brings out that in all of us, which is no bad thing. Forget Viagra, get yourself a trike! — Billy Connolly

This is what we can promise the future: a legacy of care. That we will be good stewards and not take too much or give back too little, that we will recognize wild nature for what it is, in all its magnificent and complex history - an unfathomable wealth that should be consciously saved, not ruthlessly spent. Privilege is what we inherit by our status as Homo sapiens living on this planet. This is the privilege of imagination. What we choose to do with our privilege as a species is up to each of us.
Humility is born in wildness. We are not protecting grizzlies from extinction; they are protecting us from the extinction of experience as we engage with a world beyond ourselves. The very presence of a grizzly returns us to an ecology of awe. We tremble at what appears to be a dream yet stands before us on two legs and roars. — Terry Tempest Williams

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint. — Edward Thomas

I have never cared for Castles
or a Crown that grips too tight,
Let the night sky be my starry roof
and the moon my only light,
My Heart was born a Hero,
my storm-bound sword won't rest,
I left the Harbour long ago
on a Never-ending Quest,
I am off to the horizon,
where the wild wind blows the foam,
Come get lost with me, love,
and the sea shall be our home! — Cressida Cowell

Like a true Nature's child, we were born, born to be wild — Steppenwolf

Of course there always will be darkness but I realize now something inhabits it. Historical or not. Sometimes it seems like a cat, the panther with its moon mad gait or a tiger with stripes of ash and eyes as wild as winter oceans. Sometimes it's the curve of a wrist or what's left of romance, still hiding in the drawer of some long lost nightstand or carefully drawn in the margins of an old discarded calendar. Sometimes it's even just a vapor trail speeding west, prophetic, over clouds aglow with dangerous light. Of course these are only images, my images, and in the end they're born out of something much more akin to a Voice, which though invisible to the eye and frequently unheard by even the ear still continues, day and night, year after year, to sweep through us all. — Mark Z. Danielewski

Born to be wild; born to be free; nobody owns you; you are, a romantic tree. — Santosh Kalwar

She had lived in that house fourteen years, and every year she had demanded of John that she be given a pet of some strange exotic breed. Not that she did not have enough animals. She had collected several wild and broken animals that, in a way, had become exotic by their breaking. Their roof would have collapsed from the number of birds who might have lived there if the desert hadn't killed three- quarters of those that tried to cross it. Still every animal that came within a certain radius of that house was given a welcome
the tame, the half born, the wild, the wounded. — Michael Ondaatje

She slapped his shoulder. "You... you go down to breakfast, Gram. I'll be there as soon as I shower and dress."
"Have you been exercising? You sound out of breath."
Creighton buried his face in a pillow, his body shaking with laughter.
Gram knocked on the door. "Do you have a man in there with you?"
"No, Gram..."
He pushed himself off the pillow and sat, his large hands sweeping dark hair away from his face. "Aye, she bloody well does."
Clapping sounded from the other side of the door followed by Gram's bellowing "Born to be Wild. — Vonnie Davis

A leopard doesn't change his spots just because you bring him in from the jungle and try to housebreak him and turn him into a pet. He may learn to sheathe his claws in order to beg a few scraps off the dinner table, and you may teach him to be a beast of burden, but it doesn't pay to forget that he'll al ways be what he was born: a wild animal. — George Lincoln Rockwell

Why were the flowers born so beautiful and yet so hapless? Insects can sting, and even the meekest of beasts will fight when brought to bay. The birds whose plumage is sought to deck some bonnet can fly from its pursuer, the furred animal whose coat you covet for your own may hide at your approach. Alas! The only flower known to have wings is the butterfly; all others stand helpless before the destroyer. If they shriek in their death agony their cry never reaches our hardened ears. We are ever brutal to those who love and serve us in silence, but the time may come when, for our cruelty, we shall be deserted by these best friends of ours. Have you not noticed that the wild flowers are becoming scarcer every year? It may be that their wise men have told them to depart till man becomes more human. Perhaps they have migrated to heaven. Much may be said in favor of him who — Okakura Kakuzo

In the Great War, there is no room for the faint-hearted, the cowardly. A criminal or an anarchist will be better conditioned than a bourgeois, indecisive or cowardly man. They only need a push in the right direction. Only one who is born a hero or a warrior has a place in our order. Only the Lord of the Pure Will can march to the end, breaking in the gates of the City of Eternal Life. Because will, through its perseverance, creates the thing it contemplates. Only the Wild Hordes of Odin and Parsifal will achieve the Graal. — Miguel Serrano

Do you know how to kill a Freak with your bare hands? Can you skin and cook a rabbit? Do you know what wild plants you can eat? Would you be able to get yourself from the ruins where I was born all the way up north?" I shook my head, knowing the answer already. "In my world, lady, I'm already as good as I need to be, and I don't like your tone. — Ann Aguirre

Children are born as individuals. If we fail to see that, if we see them as clay to be molded in any shape we like, the tougher ones will fight back and end up spiteful and wild, while the less strong will lose that uniqueness they were born with. — Melvin Konner

A lion is not a lion if it is only free to eat, to sleep and to copulate. It deserves to be free to hunt and to choose its own prey; to look for and find its own mate; to fight for and hold its own territory; and to die where it was born - in the wild. It should have the same rights as we have. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

What we cannot have, as I've said, is half a jungle. We can't have the world in which men and women love one another and raise healthy families, with almost all children born within wedlock and almost all children living with both parents, and their children in turn visiting their still-married grandparents, if at the same time we welcome the rest of the chaos. You can't have a child-friendly and marriage-friendly street with a porn shop and a strip club on it. The principle that the sexual "fulfillment" of adults is trumps must bear fruit accordingly. It is too wild a thing to nip here and there. It has to be uprooted. It is unworthy of a civilized and self-governing people. — Anthony Esolen

She was born to be free, let her run wild in her own way and you will never lose her. — Nikki Rowe

Take me as an example. I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I'd been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can't run very fast. I'm not particularly strong. I'd probably end up as some wild animal's dinner. — Warren Buffett

Every time you observe that more of a good thing is not always better; or you remember that improbable things happen a lot, given enough chances, and resist the lure of the Baltimore stockbroker; or you make a decision based not just on the most likely future, but on the cloud of all possible futures, with attention to which ones are likely and which ones are not; or you let go of the idea that the beliefs of groups should be subject to the same rules as beliefs of individuals; or, simply, you find that cognitive sweet spot where you can let your intuition run wild on the network of tracks formal reasoning makes for it; without writing down an equation or drawing a graph, you are doing mathematics, the extension of common sense by other means. When are you going to use it? You've been using mathematics since you were born and you'll probably never stop. Use it well. — Jordan Ellenberg

Born to be wild - live to outgrow it. — Douglas Horton

There are many objects of desire, and therefore many desires. Some are born with us, hunger, yearning, and pride of place, and some are the foolishness of the world, such as the desire to eat off silver plates. Desire is a wild horse to be tamed. Virtue is a habit long continued. The taming of desire is like the training of the athlete. Discipline is not the restraint but the use of energy ... When I forbid myself what I may have, no person is going to tempt me with what is truly forbidden. — Guy Davenport

If zoos are like arks, then rare animals are like passengers on a voyage of the damned, never to find a port that will let them dock or a land in which they can live in peace. The real solution, of course, is to preserve the wild nature that created these animals and has the power to sustain them. But if it is really true that we are inevitably moving towards a world in which mountain gorillas can survive only in zoos, then we must ask whether it is really better for them to live in artificial environments of our design than not to be born at all. — Peter Singer

The deep ecologists warn us not to be anthropocentric, but I know no way to look at the world, settled or wild, except through my own human eyes. I know that is wasn't created especially for my use, and I share the guilt for what members of my species, especially the migratory ones, have done to it. But I am the only instrument that I have access to by which I can enjoy the world and try to understand it. So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, have lived in it, known it, died in it
have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef. — Wallace Stegner

The Ocean's Song

We walked amongst the ruins famed in story
Of Rozel-Tower,
And saw the boundless waters stretch in glory
And heave in power.

O Ocean vast! We heard thy song with wonder,
Whilst waves marked time.
"Appear, O Truth!" thou sang'st with tone of thunder,
"And shine sublime!

"The world's enslaved and hunted down by beagles,
To despots sold.
Souls of deep thinkers, soar like mighty eagles!
The Right uphold.

"Be born! arise! o'er the earth and wild waves bounding,
Peoples and suns!
Let darkness vanish; tocsins be resounding,
And flash, ye guns!

"And you who love no pomps of fog or glamour,
Who fear no shocks,
Brave foam and lightning, hurricane and clamour,--
Exiles: the rocks! — Victor Hugo

In fact, public speaking anxiety may be primal and quintessentially human, not limited to those of us born with a high-reactive nervous system. One theory, based on the writings of the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, holds that when our ancestors lived on the savannah, being watched intently meant only one thing: a wild animal was stalking us. And when we think we're about to be eaten, do we stand tall and hold forth confidently? No. We run. In other words, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution urge us to get the hell off the stage, where we can mistake the gaze of the spectators for the glint in a predator's eye. — Susan Cain

Stand like a beaten anvil, when thy dream
Is laid upon thee, golden from the fire.
Flinch not, though heavily through that furnace-gleam
The black forge-hammers fall on thy desire.

Demoniac giants round thee seem to loom.
'Tis but the world-smiths heaving to and fro.
Stand like a beaten anvil. Take the doom
Their ponderous weapons deal thee, blow on blow.

Needful to truth as dew-fall to the flower
Is this wild wrath and this implacable scorn.
For every pang, new beauty, and new power,
Burning blood-red shall on thy heart be born.

Stand like a beaten anvil. Let earth's wrong
Beat on that iron and ring back in song. — Alfred Noyes

MANY DOGS RUN WILD IN THE CITY.
SOME ARE ABANDONED BY THEIR OWNERS
AND OTHERS ARE BORN TO LOST DOGS.
STRAYS HAVE A LIMITED LIFE EXPECTANCY
EVEN WHEN THEY BAND TOGETHER IN PACKS.
THEY ARE PREY TO DISEASE, PARASITES,
WEATHER AND AUTOMOBILES.
THEY TEND TO BE FRIGHTENED AND VICIOUS.
THEY ARE UNABLE TO PROTECT THEMSELVES
OR ANYONE ELSE. — Jenny Holzer

I knew that a radio somewhere was playing "Born To Be Wild" even if I couldn't hear it. — Warren Moore

Then as I got older, I always gravitated towards the hard stuff, Born To Be Wild, then Black Sabbath. — Jello Biafra