John Muir Quotes

291 Sourced Quotes

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
Even in Congress a sizable chunk of gold, carefully concealed, will outtalk and outfight all the nation on a subject like forestry. Gold, gold, gold! How strong a voice that metal has!

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

John Muir
I wonder if leaves feel lonely when they see their neighbors falling?

John Muir
As far as man is concerned [trees] are the same yesterday, today, and forever, emblems of permanence.

John Muir
I am well again, I came to life in the cool winds and crystal waters of the mountains.

John Muir
Like gigantic geysers, spouting hot stone instead of hot water, they work and sleep, and we have no sure means of knowing whether they are only sleeping or dead.

John Muir
If the Creator were to bestow a new set of senses upon us, or slightly remodel the present ones, leaving all the rest of nature unchanged, we should never doubt we were in another world, and so in strict reality we should be, just as if all the world besides our senses were changed.

John Muir
How lavish is Nature building, pulling down, creating, destroying, chasing every material particle from form to form, ever changing, ever beautiful.

John Muir
Who reports the works and ways of the clouds, those wondrous creations coming into being every day like freshly upheaved mountains?

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
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
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
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
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
The moon is looking down into the canyon, and how marvelously the great rocks kindle to her light! Every dome, and brow, and swelling boss touched by her white rays, glows as if lighted with snow.

John Muir
A lifetime is so little a time that we die before we get ready to live. I should like to study at a college, but then I have to say to myself: "You will die before you can do anything else".

John Muir
I made these Sierra trips, carrying only a sackful of bread with a little tea and sugar, and was thus independent and free....

John Muir
It is almost impossible to conceive of a devastation more universal than is produced among the plants of the Sierra by sheep.... Nine tenths of the whole surface of the Sierra has been swept by the source. It demands legislative interference.

John Muir