John Muir Quotes

291 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
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
Gold, the grand attraction that lights the way into all kinds of wilderness and makes rough places smooth.

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
I wandered away on a glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted nearly fifty years and is not yet completed, always happy and free, poor and rich, without thought of a diploma or of making a name, urged on and on through endless, inspiring Godful beauty.

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

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

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
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
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
Perhaps more than all, I was animated by a mountaineer's eagerness to get my feet in the snow once more, and my head into the clear sky, after lying dormant all winter at the level of the sea.

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

John Muir
Patient observation and constant brooding above the rocks, lying upon them for years as the ice did, is the way to arrive at the truths which are graven so lavishly upon them.

John Muir
The faint lisp of snowflakes as they alight is one of the smallest sounds mortal can hear.

John Muir
The mounds in front of their burrows glittering like heaps of jewelry, — romantic ground to live in or die in.

John Muir
Wildness was ever sounding in our ears, and Nature saw to it that besides school lessons some of her own lessons should be learned, perhaps with a view to the time when we should be called to wander in wildness to our heart's content.

John Muir
Deserts are charming to those who know how to see them — all kinds of bogs, barrens, and heathy moors; but the Modoc Lava Beds have for me an uncanny look. As I gazed the purple deepened over all the landscape. Then fell the gloaming, making everything still more forbidding and mysterious. Then, darkness like death.

John Muir
Compared with cascades and falls, avalanches are short-lived, few of them lasting more than a minute or two, and the sharp clashing sounds so common in dashing water are usually wanting; but in their low massy thunder-tones and purple-tinged whiteness, and in their dress, gait, gestures, and general behavior, they are much alike.

John Muir
Bread without butter or coffee without milk is an awful calamity, as if everything before being put in our mouth must first be held under a cow.

John Muir