Quotes from John Muir

Lake McDonald, full of brisk trout, is in the heart of this forest, and Avalanche Lake is ten miles above McDonald, at the feet of a group of glacier-laden mountains. Give a month at least to this precious reserve. The time will not be taken from the sum of your life.

You'll never make up what you lost today, I've been wandering through a thousand rooms of God's crystal temple. I've been a thousand feet down in the crevasses, with matchless domes and sculpted figures and carved ice-work all about me. Solomon's marble and ivory palaces were nothing to it. Such purity, such color, such delicate beauty! I was tempted to stay there and feed my soul, and softly freeze, until I would become part of the glacier. What a great death that would be.

longing for the mountains

take me into the mountains

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains — beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.

But the darkest scriptures of the mountains are illumined with bright passages of love that never fail to make themselves felt when one is alone. I

I cut off some of their flat, spicy plumes for a bed, gathered a store of wood, and made a cordial fire, and was at home in this vast unhandselled Yosemite.

Nothing more celestial can I conceive. How gently the winds blow! Scarce can these tranquil air-currents be called winds. They seem the very breath of Nature, whispering peace to every living thing.

No miles of any measurement can separate your soul from mine.

Anche oggi tempo splendido, una di quelle gloriose giornate della Sierra in cui ci si sente come dissolti, assorbiti, spinti innanzi pulsanti, non si sa dove. La vita non pare né lunga né breve, non ci si preoccupa di risparmiare tempo o di affrettarsi più di quanto facciano alberi e stelle. Questa è la vera libertà, un buon surrogato mortale dell'immortalità.

I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself.

Ci sono anche alcuni ginepri (Juniperus occidentalis) piccoli e tozzi, dalla corteccia color cannella e il fogliame grigio, che se ne stanno per lo più solitari, aggrappati alla pietra battuta dal sole, al sicuro dal fuoco: gran montanaro, quest'albero, robusto, resistente a tutte le interperie, si nutre di sole e di neve e con questa dieta riesce a mantenersi in buona salute anche per un migliaio d'anni.

O poder da imaginação torna-nos infinitos.

All the wilderness seems to be full of tricks and plans to drive and draw us up into God's Light.

Aside from mere money profit one would rather herd wolves than sheep.

In so wild and so beautiful a region your first day will be spent, every sight and sound novel and inspiring, and leading you far from yourself.

And how after we grow old can we read the Bible without a little helpful science? Just think, father, you cannot read your Bible without spectacles,... And spectacles cannot be made without some knowledge of the science of optics.

Some of the silly sheep got caught fast in a tangle of chaparral this morning, like flies in a spider's web, and had to be helped out. Carlo found them and tried to drive them from the trap by the easiest way. How far above sheep are intelligent dogs! No friend and helper can be more affectionate and constant than Carlo. The noble St. Bernard is an honor to his race.

Yet through all this stress the forest is maintained in marvelous beauty.

Though alligators and snakes naturally repel us, they are no mysterious evils. They dwell happily in these flowery wilds, are part of God's family, unfallen, un-depraved and cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth. A

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

Like everyone else, I was always fond of flowers, attracted by their external beauty and purity. Now my eyes wee opened to their inner beauty, all alike revealing glorious traces of the thoughts of God, and leading on and on into the infinite cosmos.

So far from complete at times is sympathy between parents and children, and so much like wild beasts are baby boys, little fighting, biting, climbing pagans.

But I had been so lectured by my father above all things to avoid praise that I was afraid to read those kind newspaper notices, and never clipped out or preserved any of them, just glanced at them and turned away my eyes from beholding vanity.