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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
Random John Muir quote
112 quotes
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.
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.
There is at least a punky spark in my heart and it may blaze in this autumn gold, fanned by the King. Some of my grandfathers must have been born on a muirland for there is heather in me, and tinctures of bog juices, that send me to Cassiope, and oozing through all my veins impel me unhaltingly through endless glacier meadows, seemingly the deeper and danker the better.
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
Misattributed These are paraphrases of Muir's quote from My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)
"Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.”
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"Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt."
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Men use care in purchasing a horse, and are neglectful in choosing friends.
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"And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul."
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Society speaks and all men listen, mountains speak and wise men listen.
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"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."
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Brought into right relationship with the wilderness … he would see that his appropriation of earth's resources beyond his personal needs would only bring imbalance and beget ultimate loss and poverty for all.
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Wilderness is not only a haven for native plants and animals but it is also a refuge from society. It's a place to go to hear the wind and little else, see the stars and the galaxies, smell the pine trees, feel the cold water, touch the sky and the ground at the same time, listen to coyotes, eat the fresh snow, walk across the desert sands, and realize why it's good to go outside of the city and the suburbs. Fortunately, there is wilderness just outside the limits of the cities and the suburbs in most of the United States, especially in the West.
Misattributed
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