John Muir Quotes

#1. The moon is looking down into the canyon, and how marvelously the great rocks kindle to her light! Every dome, and brow, and swelling boss touched by her white rays, glows as if lighted with snow.

John Muir

#2. I wonder if leaves feel lonely when they see their neighbors falling?

John Muir

#3. See how God writes history. No technical knowledge is required; only a calm day and a calm mind.

John Muir

#4. But to gain a perfect view, one must go yet further, over a curving brow to a slight shelf on the extreme brink.

John Muir

#5. Beetles and butterflies are sometimes restricted to small areas. Each mountain in a range, and even the different zones of a mountain, may have its own peculiar species. But the house-fly seems to be everywhere. I wonder if any island in mid-ocean is flyless.

John Muir

#6. How infinitely superior to our physical senses are those of the mind!

John Muir

#7. Every morning, arising from the death of sleep, the happy plants and all our fellow animal creatures great and small, and even the rocks, seemed to be shouting, Awake, awake, rejoice, rejoice, come love us and join in our song. Come! Come!

John Muir

#8. Many of Nature's finest lessons are to be found in her storms, and if careful to keep in right relations with them, we may go safely abroad with them, rejoicing in the grandeur and beauty of their works and ways.

John Muir

#9. Yosemite Park ... None can escape its charms. Its natural beauty cleans and warms like a fire, and you will be willing to stay forever in one place like a tree.

John Muir

#10. But no temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life ... as if into this one mountain mansion Nature had gathered her choicest treasures ...

John Muir

#11. How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!

John Muir

#12. I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God's mountains.

John Muir

#13. Wilderness is a necessity ... They will see what I meant in time. There must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls. Food and drink is not all. There is the spiritual. In some it is only a germ, of course, but the germ will grow.

John Muir

#14. So extraordinary is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert. And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees ...

John Muir

#15. The coniferous forests of the Yosemite Park, and of the Sierra in general, surpass all others of their kind in America, or indeed the world, not only in the size and beauty of the trees, but in the number of species assembled together, and the grandeur of the mountains they are growing on.

John Muir

#16. Going to the woods is going home.

John Muir

#17. I wandered away on a glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted nearly fifty years and is not yet completed, always happy and free, poor and rich, without thought of a diploma or of making a name, urged on and on through endless, inspiring Godful beauty.

John Muir

#18. All the world was before me and every day was a holiday, so it did not seem important to which one of the world's wildernesses I first should wander.

John Muir

#19. Large flocks of butterflies, all kinds of happy insects, seem to be in a perfect fever of joy and sportive gladness.

John Muir

#20. When you tug at a single thing in the universe, you'll find its attached to everything else.

John Muir

#21. He had gone to the higher Sierras ... [about Ralph Waldo Emerson's death]

John Muir

#22. In God's wildness lies the hope of the world - the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.

John Muir

#23. I am very blessed. The Valley is full of people, but they do not annoy me. I revolve in pathless places and in higher rocks than the world and his ribbony wife can reach.

John Muir

#24. I never saw a discontented tree.

John Muir

#25. And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul

John Muir

#26. There is no estimating the wit and wisdom concealed and latent in our lower fellow mortals until made manifest by profound experiences; for it is through suffering that dogs as well as saints are developed and made perfect.

John Muir

#27. Wherever we go in the mountains, we find more than we seek.

John Muir

#28. Earth has no sorrow that earth can not heal.

John Muir

#29. How lavish is Nature building, pulling down, creating, destroying, chasing every material particle from form to form, ever changing, ever beautiful.

John Muir

#30. This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

John Muir

#31. These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.

John Muir

#32. Government protection should be thrown around every wild grove and forest on the mountains, as it is around every private orchard, and the trees in public parks. To say nothing of their value as fountains of timber, they are worth infinitely more than all the gardens and parks of towns.

John Muir

#33. No Sierra landscape that I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in manufactories is called rubbish or waste; everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons.

John Muir

#34. The mountains are calling and I must go.

John Muir

#35. The Big Tree is Nature's forest masterpiece, and so far as I know, the greatest of living things.

John Muir

#36. It may not be easy, life isn't easy, but dreams keep you alive.

John Muir

#37. When California was wild, it was the floweriest part of the continent.

John Muir

#38. Better to toil blindly, beating every stone in turn for grains of gold, whether they contain any or not, than lie down in apathetic decay.

John Muir

#39. Man and other civilized animals are the only creatures that ever become dirty.

John Muir

#40. The world's big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.

John Muir

#41. No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite.

John Muir

#42. Under the Timber and Stone Act of 1878, which might well have been called the 'Dust and Ashes Act,' any citizen of the United States could take up one hundred and sixty acres of timber land and, by paying two dollars and a half an acre for it, obtain title.

John Muir

#43. From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals.

John Muir

#44. The making of the far-famed New York Central Park was opposed by even good men, with misguided pluck, perseverance, and ingenuity, but straight right won its way, and now that park is appreciated. So we confidently believe it will be with our great national parks and forest reservations.

John Muir

#45. I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news

John Muir

#46. Rivers flow not past, but through us; tingling, vibrating, exciting every cell and fiber in our bodies, making them sing and glide.

John Muir

#47. Who reports the works and ways of the clouds, those wondrous creations coming into being every day like freshly upheaved mountains?

John Muir

#48. Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.

John Muir

#49. Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

John Muir

#50. I always enjoyed the hearty society of a snowstorm.

John Muir

#51. Quench love, and what is left of a man's life but the folding of a few jointed bones and square inches of flesh? Who would call that life?

John Muir

#52. Men use care in purchasing a horse, and are neglectful in choosing friends.

John Muir

#53. Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing

John Muir

#54. The mountains are fountains not only of rivers and fertile soil, but of men.

John Muir

#55. The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes, the heart of the people is always right.

John Muir

#56. I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer.

John Muir

#57. But no punishment, however sure and severe, was of any avail against the attraction of the fields and woods. It had other uses, developing memory, etc., but in keeping us at home it was of no use at all.

John Muir

#58. The battle for conservation will go on endlessly. It is part of the universal battle between right and wrong.

John Muir

#59. I like to walk, touch living Mother Earth - bare feet best, and thrill every step. Used to envy happy reptiles that had advantage of so much body in contact with earth, bosom to bosom. [We] live with our heels as well as head and most of our pleasure comes in that way.

John Muir

#60. Yet how hard most people work for mere dust and ashes and care, taking no thought of growing in knowledge and grace, never having time to get in sight of their own ignorance.

John Muir

#61. Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.

John Muir

#62. The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.

John Muir

#63. Every atom in creation may be said to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality.

John Muir

#64. The soft light of morning falls upon ripening forests of oak and elm, walnut and hickory, and all Nature is thoughtful and calm.

John Muir

#65. The last days of this glacial winter are not yet past; we live in 'creation's dawn.' The morning stars still sing together, and the world, though made, is still being made and becoming more beautiful every day.

John Muir

#66. Doubly happy, however, is the man to whom lofty mountain tops are within reach.

John Muir

#67. Man has injured every animal he has touched.

John Muir

#68. The power of imagination makes us infinite.

John Muir

#69. I've had a great time in South America and South Africa. Indeed it now seems that on this pair of wild hot continents I've enjoyed the most fruitful year of my life.

John Muir

#70. To sit in solitude, to think in solitude with only the music of the stream and the cedar to break the flow of silence, there lies the value of wilderness.

John Muir

#71. In the beauty and grandeur of individual trees, and in number and variety of species, the Sierra forests surpass all others

John Muir

#72. Nothing truly wild is unclean.

John Muir

#73. Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever.

John Muir

#74. This is Nature's own reservation, and every lover of wildness will rejoice with me that by kindly frost it is so well defended.

John Muir

#75. In most mills, only the best portions of the best trees are used, while the ruins are left on the ground to feed great fires which kill much of what is left of the less desirable timber, together with the seedlings on which the permanence of the forest depends.

John Muir

#76. Writing is like the life of a glacier; one eternal grind.

John Muir

#77. Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.

John Muir

#78. As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.

John Muir

#79. The sun shines not on us but in us.

John Muir

#80. One can make a day of any size

John Muir

#81. What a psalm the storm was singing, and how fresh the smell of the washed earth and leaves, and how sweet the still small voices of the storm!

John Muir

#82. In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.

John Muir

#83. Plants, animals, and stars are all kept in place, bridled along appointed ways, with one another, and through the midst of one another
killing and being killed, eating and being eaten, in harmonious proportions and quantities.

John Muir

#84. Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions.

John Muir

#85. God never made an ugly landscape. All that sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.

John Muir

#86. Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed - chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones.

John Muir

#87. A queer fellow and a jolly fellow is the grasshopper. Up the mountains he comes on excursions, how high I don't know, but at least as far and high as Yosemite tourists.

John Muir

#88. I tied a crust of bread to my belt, and with Carlo set out for the upper slopes of the Pilot Peak Ridge, and had a good day, notwithstanding the care of seeking the silly runaways.

John Muir

#89. They tell us that plants are not like man immortal, but are perishable-soul -less. I think that is something that we know exactly nothing about.

John Muir

#90. Hidden in the glorious wildness like unmined gold.

John Muir

#91. My meals were easily made, for they were all alike and simple, only a cupful of tea and bread.

John Muir

#92. I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

John Muir

#93. The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

John Muir

#94. Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both solitude and society ...

John Muir

#95. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit - the cosmos?

John Muir

#96. Every purely natural object is a conductor of divinity, and we have but to expose ourselves in a clean condition to any of these conductors, to be fed and nourished by them. Only in this way can we procure our daily spirit bread.

John Muir

#97. I made these Sierra trips, carrying only a sackful of bread with a little tea and sugar, and was thus independent and free ...

John Muir

#98. So also there are tides and floods in the affairs of men, which in some are slight and may be kept within bounds, but in others they overmaster everything.

John Muir

#99. There are no accidents in Nature,

John Muir

#100. It was the afternoon of the day and the afternoon of his life, and his course was now westward down all the mountains into the sunset. [speaking about Ralph Waldo Emerson]

John Muir