John Muir Quotes

291 Sourced Quotes

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

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

John Muir
In the beauty and grandeur of individual trees, and in number and variety of species, the Sierra forests surpass all others

John Muir
Even the storms are friendly and seem to regard you as a brother, their beauty and tremendous fateful earnestness charming alike.

John Muir
Not a peak, ridge, dome, canyon, lake basin, garden, forest, or stream but in some way explains the past existence and modes of action of flowing, grinding, sculpturing, soil making, scenery making ice.

John Muir
In the solemn gloom, the geysers, dimly visible, look like monstrous dancing ghosts, and their wild songs and the earthquake thunder replying to the storms overhead seem doubly terrible, as if divine government were at an end.

John Muir
A little pure wildness is the one great present want, both of men and sheep.

John Muir
If you are not very strong, try to climb Electric Peak when a big bossy, well-charged thunder-cloud is on it, to breathe the ozone set free, and get yourself kindly shaken and shocked. You are sure to be lost in wonder and praise, and every hair of your head will stand up and hum and sing like an enthusiastic congregation.

John Muir
For all the way up the long red slate slopes, that in the distance seemed barren, you find little garden beds and tufts of dwarf phlox, ivesia, and blue arctic daisies that go straight to your heart, blessed fellow mountaineers kept safe and warm by a thousand miracles.

John Muir
Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods.

John Muir
Man and other civilized animals are the only creatures that ever become dirty.

John Muir
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.

John Muir
I've had a great time in South America and South Africa. Indeed it now seems that on this pair of wild hot continents I've enjoyed the most fruitful year of my life.

John Muir
Nature, like an enthusiastic gardener, could not resist the temptation to plant flowers everywhere.

John Muir
Then to think of the infinite numbers of smaller fellow mortals, invisibly small, compared with which the smallest ants are as mastodons.

John Muir
Beside the grand history of the glaciers and their own, the mountain streams sing the history of every avalanche or earthquake and of snow, all easily recognized by the human ear, and every word evoked by the falling leaf and drinking deer, beside a thousand other facts so small and spoken by the stream in so low a voice the human ear cannot hear them.

John Muir
Many of nature's five hundred kinds of wild trees had to make way for orchards and cornfields.

John Muir
I should study Nature's laws in all their crossings and unions; I should follow magnetic streams to their source and follow the shores of our magnetic oceans. I should go among the rays of the aurora, and follow them to their beginnings, and study their dealings and communications with other powers and expressions of matter.

John Muir
Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally.

John Muir
The great wilds of our country, once held to be boundless and inexhaustible, are being rapidly invaded and overrun in every direction, and everything destructible in them is being destroyed. How far destruction may go it is not easy to guess. Every landscape, low and high, seems doomed to be trampled and harried. Even the sky is not safe from scath-blurred and blackened whole summers together with the smoke of fires that devour the woods.

John Muir
Ungovernable energy, rushing down smooth inclines in wide foamy sheets fold over fold, springing up here and there in magnificent whirls, scattering crisp clashing spray for the sunbeams to iris, bursting with hoarse reverberating roar through ragged gorges and boulder dams, booming in falls, gliding, glancing with cool soothing, murmuring...

John Muir
Large flocks of butterflies, all kinds of happy insects, seem to be in a perfect fever of joy and sportive gladness.

John Muir
Nature... leading us with work... yet cheers us like a mother with tender prattle words of love.

John Muir
Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both solitude and society...

John Muir
None may wholly escape the good of Nature, however imperfectly exposed to her blessings. The minister will not preach a perfectly flat and sedimentary sermon after climbing a snowy peak; and the fair play and tremendous impartiality of Nature, so tellingly displayed, will surely affect the after pleadings of the lawyer. Fresh air at least will get into everybody, and the cares of mere business will be quenched like the fires of a sinking ship.

John Muir
Nature has always something rare to show us... and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof.

John Muir
It is a vast wilderness of rocks in a sea of light, colored and glowing like oak and maple in autumn, when the sun gold is richest

John Muir
So abundant and novel are the objects of interest in a pure wilderness that unless you are pursuing special studies it matters little where you go, or how often to the same place. Wherever you chance to be always seems at the moment of all places the best; and you feel that there can be no happiness in this world or in any other for those who may not be happy there.

John Muir
The air was perfectly delicious, sweet enough for the breath of angels. Every draught of it gave a separate and distinct piece of pleasure. I do not believe that Adam and Eve tasted better in their balmiest nook.

John Muir
Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the unreal. Yet is true imagination healthful and real, no more likely to mislead than the coarse senses. Indeed, the power of imagination makes us infinite.

John Muir