John Muir Quotes

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.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

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

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.

Nature chose for a tool, not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries.

Of all the fire mountains which like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest.

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

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

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

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation's braggart lords.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

Tug on anything at all and you'll find it connected to everything else in the universe.

We all travel the milky way together, trees and men... trees are travellers, in the ordinary sense. They make journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true: but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-wavings - many of them not so much.

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

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.