Quotes from John Muir

In God's wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.

The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.

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.

We all travel the milky way together, trees and men... trees are travellers, in the ordinary sense. They make journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true: but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-wavings - many of them not so much.

One can make a day of any size.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thought and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains—mountain-dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops.

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

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.

[We] live with our heels as well as head and most of our pleasure comes in that way.

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

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.

The mountains are calling and I must go.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity

The world's big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.

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

I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news

In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks.

The sun shines not on us but in us.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man — a presumption not supported by all the facts.

Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.

As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can".

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.