Best John Muir Quotes

#1. I am learning to live close to the lives of my friends without ever seeing them. No miles of any measurement can separate your soul from mine.

John Muir

#2. John Muir, Earth - planet, Universe
[Muir's home address, as inscribed on the inside front cover of his first field journal]

John Muir

#3. 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

#4. But we are governed more than we know, and most when we are wildest.

John Muir

#5. The blessings of one mountain day, whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever.

John Muir

#6. There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation's braggart lords.

John Muir

#7. Keep close to Nature's heart, yourself; and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean...

[John Muir to Samuel Hall Young]

Samuel Hall Young

#8. Go where we will, all the world over, we seem to have been there before.

John Muir

#9. Storms of every sort, torrents, earthquakes, cataclysms, 'convulsions of nature,' etc., however mysterious and lawless at first sight they may seem, are only harmonious notes in the song of creation, varied expressions of God's love.

John Muir

#10. God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

John Muir

#11. Keep in view the common good of the people for all time.

John Muir

#12. In the eternal youth of Nature, you may renew your own.

John Muir

#13. 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

#14. The water in music the oar forsakes. The air in music the wing forsakes. All things in move in music and write it. The mouse, lizard, and grasshopper sing together on the Turlock sands, sing with the morning stars.

John Muir

#15. In the woods is perpetual youth.

John Muir

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

John Muir

#17. The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning, it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.

John Muir

#18. Galen Clark was the best mountaineer I ever met, and one of the kindest and most amiable of all my mountain friends.

John Muir

#19. 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

#20. One of the best ways to see tree flowers is to climb one of the tallest trees and to get into close, tingling touch with them, and then look broad.

John Muir

#21. 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

#22. Here ends my forever memorable first High Sierra excursion. I have crossed the Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built. And, rejoicing in its glory, I gladly, gratefully, hopefully pray I may see it again.

John Muir

#23. Now, wilderness can be seen as a useful fiction, a fiction constructed by John Muir and his heirs and deployed to keep places from being destroyed by resource extraction and wholesale development.

Rebecca Solnit

#24. I bade adieu to mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God.

John Muir

#25. Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.

John Muir

#26. When I discovered a new plant, I sat down beside it for a minute or a day, to make its acquaintance and hear what it had to tell ... I asked the boulders I met, whence they came and whither they were going.

John Muir

#27. Of all the mountain ranges I have climbed, I like the Sierra Nevada the best.

John Muir

#28. 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

#29. To the lover of wilderness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.

John Muir

#30. Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer.

John Muir

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

John Muir

#32. I wish I knew where I was going. Doomed to be carried of the spirit into the wilderness, I suppose. I wish I could be more moderate in my desires, but I cannot, and so there is no rest.

John Muir

#33. In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks.

John Muir

#34. Nature has always something rare to show us ... and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof.

John Muir

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

John Muir

#36. Good luck and Good work for the happy mountain raindrops, each one of them a high waterfall in itself, descending from the cliffs and hollows of the clouds to the cliffs and hollows of the rocks, out of the sky-thunder into the thunder of the falling rivers.

John Muir

#37. 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

#38. The grand show is eternal
It is always sunrise somewhere

John Muir

#39. 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

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

John Muir

#41. 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

#42. These beautiful days ... do not exist as mere pictures - maps hung upon the walls of memory to brighten at times when touched by association or will ... They saturate themselves into every part of the body and live always.

John Muir

#43. Bread without butter or coffee without milk is an awful calamity, as if everything before being put in our mouth must first be held under a cow.

John Muir

#44. I have a low opinion of books: they are piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention ...

John Muir

#45. 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

#46. I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

John Muir