John Muir Quotes

Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.

This time it is real - all must die, and where could mountaineer find a more glorious death!

Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.

John Muir, Earth - planet, Universe

[Muir's home address, as inscribed on the inside front cover of his first field journal]

Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm,
waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like
worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their
songs never cease. -John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)

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

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity

The world's big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.

The mountains are calling and I must go.

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.

Going to the woods is going home.

Most people are on the world, not in it - have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them - undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.

There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!