Top 100 Muir's Quotes
#1. His treatment of mechanical problems wasn't divorced from the worldly situations in which they arise, and as a result [John Muir's service manual on Volkswagens] is extraordinarily clear and useful. It has a human quality, as well.
Matthew B. Crawford
#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. Surely all God's people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes- all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them.
John Muir
#4. Time also was said to be an accident: it "exists not by itself; but simply from the things which happen, the sense apprehends what has been done in time past, as well as what is present, and what is to follow after.
Matthew Moncrieff Pattison Muir
#5. All wilderness seems to be full of tricks and plans to drive and draw us up into God's light.
John Muir
#6. Sequoia seeds have flat wings, and glint and glance in their flight like a boy's kite.
John Muir
#7. 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
#8. He had gone to the higher Sierras ... [about Ralph Waldo Emerson's death]
John Muir
#9. Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.
John Muir
#10. Never while anything is left of me shall this ... camp be forgotten. It has fairly grown into me, not merely as memory pictures, but as part and parcel of mind and body alike.
John Muir
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Going to the woods is going home.
John Muir
#14. While cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
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. How narrow we selfish conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation!
John Muir
#17. C. albus ... I think the very loveliest of all the lily family,- a spotless soul, plant saint, that every one must love and so be made better. It puts the wildest mountaineer on his good behavior. With this plant the whole world would seem rich though non other existed.
John Muir
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Kindness and courage can repair time's faults, And serving him breeds patience and courtesy In us, light sojourners and passing subjects.
Edwin Muir
#21. There is a road that turning always Cuts off the country of Again. Archers stand there on every side And as it runstime's deer is slain, And lies where it has lain.
Edwin Muir
#23. One should go to the woods for safety, if for nothing else.
John Muir
#24. Over the summit, I saw the so-called Mono desert lying dreamily silent in the thick, purple light
a desert of heavy sun-glare beheld from a desert of ice-burnished granite.
John Muir
#25. 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
#26. How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!
John Muir
#27. Come to the woods, for here is rest, ...climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
John Muir
#28. None of Nature's landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.
John Muir
#29. The body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one's flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure glow not explainable.
John Muir
#30. Only spread a fern-frond over a man's head and worldly cares are cast out, and freedom and beauty and peace come in.
John Muir
#31. Wildness was ever sounding in our ears, and Nature saw to it that besides school lessons some of her own lessons should be learned, perhaps with a view to the time when we should be called to wander in wildness to our heart's content.
John Muir
#32. It's not that difficult for most, but the few who think they're entitled to an easy life make it seem like that's the way of the world.
Diane Greenwood Muir
#33. The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain - a magic wand in Nature's hand - every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?
John Muir
#34. 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
#35. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.
John Muir
#36. 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
#37. As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were God's ways
John Muir
#38. Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing
John Muir
#39. 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
#40. No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.
John Muir
#41. Some breakfast food manufacturer hit upon the simple notion of emptying out the leavings of carthorse nose bags, adding a few other things like unconsumed portions of chicken layer's mash, and the sweepings of racing stables, packing the mixture in little bags and selling them in health food shops.
Frank Muir
#42. One may as well dam for water tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.
John Muir
#43. A golf ball is white, dimpled like a bishop's knees, and is the size of small mandarin oranges or those huge pills which vets blow down the throats of constipated cart-horses.
Frank Muir
#44. It has been said that a bride's attitude towards her betrothed can be summed up in three words: Aisle. Alter. Hymn.
Frank Muir
#45. Thanks to the fictional character named Fraser, in a well-loved Scottish novel, Alexander's existence on the grounds of Culloden had become its own bit of Hell.
L.L. Muir
#46. John Muir, the famous naturalist, wrote in his journal that you should never go to Alaska as a young man because you'll never be satisfied with any other place as long as you live. And there's a lot of truth to that.
Tom Bodett
#47. One day's exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books.
John Muir
#48. The world's big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.
John Muir
#49. Wherever we go in the mountains, or indeed in any of God's wild fields, we find more than we seek.
John Muir
#50. The Big Tree is Nature's forest masterpiece, and so far as I know, the greatest of living things.
John Muir
#51. Keep close to Nature's heart ... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.
John Muir
#52. In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks.
John Muir
#53. I've always liked Muir without knowing quite why.
Douglas Dunn
#54. Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humour is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude.
Frank Muir
#55. I have observed in foolish awe
The dateless mid-days of the law
And seen indifferent justice done
By everyone on everyone.
Edwin Muir
#56. 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
#57. The first time it felt really dangerous, like the sort of thing you had to lock the doors and close the curtains on because if anybody saw you, God would strike you down with a thunderbolt. But I took to it like a duck to water.
Jamie Muir
#58. How infinitely superior to our physical senses are those of the mind!
John Muir
#59. 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
#60. The grand show is eternal
It is always sunrise somewhere
John Muir
#61. 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
#62. I bade adieu to mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God.
John Muir
#63. See how God writes history. No technical knowledge is required; only a calm day and a calm mind.
John Muir
#64. 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
#65. Swift flies our time on pinions fleet, Like vapours on the breeze; The transient bliss we now call sweet, The passing moments seize. The gilded joy, the present hour, Soon wing themselves away; Departing like the fading flower That pleas'd us Yesterday.
William Muir
#66. 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
#67. I wonder if leaves feel lonely when they see their neighbors falling?
John Muir
#68. Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer.
John Muir
#69. To the lover of wilderness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.
John Muir
#70. 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
#71. Of all the mountain ranges I have climbed, I like the Sierra Nevada the best.
John Muir
#72. 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
#73. Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.
John Muir
#74. 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
#75. The ancestral deed is thought and done,
And in a million Edens fall
A million Adams drowned in darkness,
For small is great and great is small,
And a blind seed all.
Edwin Muir
#76. The golden rule when reading the menu is, if you cannot pronounce it, you cannot afford it.
Frank Muir
#77. The redwoods you can see in Muir Woods are nothing like the redwood titans that stand in the rainforest valleys of the North Coast, closer to Oregon. These are the dreadnoughts of trees, the blue whales of the plant kingdom.
Richard Preston
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. In the eternal youth of Nature, you may renew your own.
John Muir
#81. Keep in view the common good of the people for all time.
John Muir
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. The glances over cocktails That seem to be so sweet Don't seem quite so amorous Over Shredded Wheat
Frank Muir
#85. Go where we will, all the world over, we seem to have been there before.
John Muir
#86. 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
#87. There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation's braggart lords.
John Muir
#88. The speeches to be wary of are those that begin with I'm just going to say a few words.
Frank Muir
#89. In the woods is perpetual youth.
John Muir
#90. The blessings of one mountain day, whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever.
John Muir
#91. But we are governed more than we know, and most when we are wildest.
John Muir
#92. 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
#93. The reasons why I left were to do with my interest in Buddhism. There were experiences over a period of about six months which caused me to decide to give up music, so one morning I felt I had to go to E.G. Management and tell them.
Jamie Muir
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Look! Nature is overflowing with the grandeur of God!
John Muir
#100. 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
