John Muir Quotes

"Most people are on the world, not in it - having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them - undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate"

"Nature chose for a tool, not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries."

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

"The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual."

"Memories may escape the action of the will, may sleep a long time, but when stirred by the right influence, though that influence be light as a shadow, they flash into full stature and life with everything in place"

"How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!"

"I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."

"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings."

"Of all the fire mountains which like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest."

"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness."

"“The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”"

"The battle we have fought, and are still fighting for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong, and we cannot expect to see the end of it ... So we must count on watching and striving for these trees, and should always be glad to find anything so surely good and noble to strive for."

"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."

"Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you."

"The power of imagination makes us infinite."

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul."

"Tug on anything at all and you'll find it connected to everything else in the universe."

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul."

"Society speaks and all men listen, mountains speak and wise men listen"

"Doubly happy, however, is the man whom lofty mountain tops are within reach, for the lights that shine there illumine all that lies below"