John Muir Quotes
How narrow we selfish conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation!
How lavish is Nature building, pulling down, creating, destroying, chasing every material particle from form to form, ever changing, ever beautiful.
At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed like devout worshippers waiting to be blessed.
There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.
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.
When you tug at a single thing in the universe, you'll find its attached to everything else.
What is worthwhile in life? I think it is worth living and dreaming. If you don't you may be dead anyhow - inside.
Wander here a whole summer, if you can ... Thousands of wild blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted
To ask me whether I could endure to live without friends is absurd. It is easy enough to live out of material sight of friends, but to live without human love is impossible.
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?
Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or little we may be able to read them; telling their wanderings even by their scents alone.
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.
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.
There is a love of wild nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties
The battle we have fought, and are still fighting, for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong.
Nature had gathered her choicest treasures , to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her
Who reports the works and ways of the clouds, those wondrous creations coming into being every day like freshly upheaved mountains?
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.
Large flocks of butterflies, all kinds of happy insects, seem to be in a perfect fever of joy and sportive gladness.
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.
The Big Tree is Nature's forest masterpiece, and so far as I know, the greatest of living things.
I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found.
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.
In drying plants, botanists often dry themselves. Dry words and dry facts will not fire hearts.
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.
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 tide of visitors will float slowly about the bottom of the valley as harmless scum collecting in hotel and saloon eddies, leaving the rocks and falls eloquent as ever.
The finest of the glacier meadow gardens lie ...imbedded in the upper pine forests like lakes of light.
Listen to them! How wholly infused with God is this one big word of love that we call the world!
See how God writes history. No technical knowledge is required; only a calm day and a calm mind.
