Quotes from John Muir

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed - chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones.

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.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

To the lover of pure wildness Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.

Any fool can destroy trees, they cannot run away.

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men.

Yosemite Park... None can escape its charms. Its natural beauty cleans and warms like a fire, and you will be willing to stay forever in one place like a tree.

Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.

Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts . . .

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

I never saw a discontented tree.

God cannot save them from fools.

Gigantic second and third growth trees are found in the redwoods, forming magnificent temple-like circles around charred ruins more than a thousand years old.

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.

The battle we have fought, and are still fighting, for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong.

The Big Tree is Nature's forest masterpiece, and so far as I know, the greatest of living things.

When a man plants a tree, he plants himself.

We all flow from one fountain- Soul. All are expressions of one love.

Listen to them! How wholly infused with God is this one big word of love that we call the world!

I ran home in the moonlight with firm strides; for the sun-love made me strong.

Of all the mountain ranges I have climbed, I like the Sierra Nevada the best.

Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries.

I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. 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.

The making of the far-famed New York Central Park was opposed by even good men, with misguided pluck, perseverance, and ingenuity, but straight right won its way, and now that park is appreciated. So we confidently believe it will be with our great national parks and forest reservations.