John Muir Quotes

291 Sourced Quotes

In nothing does man, with his grand notions of heaven and charity, show forth his innate, low-bred, wild animalism more clearly than in his treatment of his brother beasts. From the shepherd with his lambs to the red-handed hunter, it is the same; no recognition of rights - only murder in one form or another.

John Muir
No words will ever describe the exquisite beauty and charm of this mountain park – Nature's landscape garden at once tenderly beautiful and sublime. No wonder it draws nature-lovers from all over the world.

John Muir
The sun, looking down on the tranquil landscape, seems conscious of the presence of every living thing on which he is pouring his blessings, while they in turn, with perhaps the exception of man, seem conscious of the presence of the sun as a benevolent father and stand hushed and waiting.

John Muir
The tide of visitors will float slowly about the bottom of the valley as harmless scum collecting in hotel and saloon eddies, leaving the rocks and falls eloquent as ever.

John Muir
Resolute, consummate, determined in form, always beheld with wondering admiration, the Big Tree always seems unfamiliar, standing alone, unrelated, with peculiar physiognomy, awfully solemn and earnest.

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 of their bark hides.

John Muir
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.

John Muir
The Big Tree (Sequoia gigantea) is Nature's forest masterpiece, and, so far as I know, the greatest of living things.

John Muir
Ants whose tiny sparks of life only burn the brighter with the heat.

John Muir
The sound was inconceivably deep and broad and earnest, as if the whole earth, like a living creature, had at last found a voice and were calling to her sister planets.

John Muir
No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life...Awful in stern, immovable majesty, how softly these rocks are adorned, and how fine and reassuring the company they keep: Their feet among beautiful groves and meadows, their brows in the sky, a thousand flowers leaning confidingly against their feet, bathed in floods of water, floods of light...

John Muir
Uncle Sam is not often called a fool in business matters, yet he has sold millions of acres of timber land at two dollars and a half an acre on which a single tree was worth more than a hundred dollars. But this priceless land has been patented, and nothing can be done now about the crazy bargain.... a bad, black business from beginning to end.

John Muir
When we are with Nature we are awake, and we discover many interesting things and reach many a mark we are not aiming at.

John Muir
Why ought man to value himself as more than an infinitely small composing unit of the one great unit of creation?...The universe would be incomplete without man, but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceptual eyes and knowledge.

John Muir
No matter, therefore, what may be the note which any creature forms in the song of existence, it is made first for itself, then more and more remotely for all the world and worlds.

John Muir
Every atom in creation may be said to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality.

John Muir
Nature had gathered her choicest treasures, to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her

John Muir
The redwood is one of the few conifers that sprout from the stump and roots, and it declares itself willing to begin immediately to repair the damage of the lumberman and also that of the forest-burner.

John Muir
Ink cannot tell the glow that lights me at this moment in turning to the mountains. I feel strong [enough] to leap Yosemite walls at a bound.

John Muir
How fiercely, devoutly wild is Nature in the midst of her beauty loving tenderness.

John Muir
Nature seems to have gathered them from all the world as specimens of her rarest fountains, to show in one place what she can do.

John Muir