John Muir Quotes

291 Sourced Quotes

To lie out alone in the mountains of a still night and be touched by the first of these small silent messengers from the sky is a memorable experience, and the fineness of that touch none will forget.

John Muir
Around your camp fire the flowers seem to be looking eagerly at the light, and the crystals shine unweariedly, making fine company as you lie at rest in the very heart of the vast, serene, majestic night.

John Muir
Baby grubs, happy fellows, find themselves in a sweet world of plenty, feeding their way through the heart of the cone from one nut-chamber to another, secure from rain and wind and heat, until their wings are grown and they are ready to launch out into the free ocean of air and light.

John Muir
Strange the faithless fuss made about taking a walk in the safest and pleasantest of all places, a wilderness.

John Muir
Like Thoreau they see forests in orchards and patches of huckleberry brush, and oceans in ponds and drops of dew.

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

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
If I should be fated to walk no more with Nature, be compelled to leave all I most devoutly love in the wilderness, return to civilization and be twisted into the characterless cable of society, then these sweet, free, cumberless rovings will be as chinks and slits on life's horizon, through which I may obtain glimpses of the treasures that lie in God's wilds beyond my reach.

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
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
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
Word lessons, in particular the wouldst couldst shouldst have loved kind, were kept up, with much warlike thrashing, until I had committed the whole of French, Latin, and English grammars to memory...

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

John Muir
The drifts and tunnels in the rocks may perhaps be regarded as the prayers of the prospector, offered for the wealth he so earnestly craves; but like the prayers of any kind not in harmony with nature, they are unanswered.

John Muir
Sequoia seeds have flat wings and glint and glance in their flight like a boy's kite.

John Muir
Quench love, and what is left of a man's life but the folding of a few jointed bones and square inches of flesh? Who would call that life?

John Muir
A man, in his books, may be said to walk the earth a long time after he is gone.

John Muir
My meals were easily made, for they were all alike and simple, only a cupful of tea and bread.

John Muir
Mining discoveries and progress, retrogression and decay, seem to have been crowded more closely against each other here than on any other portion of the globe.

John Muir
To ask me whether I could endure to live without friends is absurd. It is easy enough to live out of material sight of friends, but to live without human love is impossible.

John Muir
I have seen oaks of many species in many kinds of exposure and soil, but those of Kentucky excel in grandeur all I had ever before beheld. They are broad and dense and bright green. In the leafy bowers and caves of their long branches dwell magnificent avenues of shade, and every tree seems to be blessed with a double portion of strong exulting life.

John Muir
Lizards of every temper, style, and color dwell here, seemingly as happy and companionable as the birds and squirrels.

John Muir
To the dwellers of the plain, dependent on irrigation, the Big Tree, leaving all its higher uses out of the count, is a tree of life, a never failing spring, sending living water to the lowlands all through the hot, rainless summer.

John Muir