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John Muir Quotes
1838–1914 Scotland
John Muir (21 April 1838 – 24 December 1914) was a Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States. His letters, essays, and telling of his adventures in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada of California, have been read by millions.
Scotland Activists Botanists Engineers Environmentalists Also known as: Muir, John
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112 quotes
Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds, or the written music of water written in river-lines?
Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.
How terribly downright must seem the utterances of storms and earthquakes to those accustomed to the soft hypocrisies of society.
I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer.
The mountains are calling and I must go.
Take a course of good water and air, and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.
In every country the mountains are fountains, not only of rivers but of men. Therefore we all are born mountaineers, the offspring of rock and sunshine.
Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done and suffered by her creatures. All scars she heals, whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts.
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.
This time it is real — all must die, and where could mountaineer find a more glorious death!
Of all the fire-mountains which, like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest.
Our National Parks (1901)
Good walkers can go anywhere in these hospitable mountains without artificial ways.
Most interesting forest I have seen in my whole life.
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.
Man as he came from the hand of his Maker was poetic in both mind and body, but the gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed Nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers' plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul.
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.
I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found.
Lie down among the pines for a while, then get to plain pure white love-work … to help humanity and other mortals and the Lord.
This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest … in our magnificent National Parks … Nature's sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world.
The Yosemite (1912)
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