Our John Muir quotes collection speak to his love of nature and the environment.
Known famously as the Father of the National Parks or John of the Mountains, John Muir is among the most revered naturalists, tree-hugger, and outdoor enthusiasts from America. It is believed that he played one of the most important roles in preserving much of the forests in various parts of the United States.
Muir’s love for nature and his environmental activism helped in preserving many wilderness areas in the country, the most famous among which are the Sequoia National Park and Yosemite Valley. His essays, letters, poems, and books on his adventures, findings, and suggestions have inspired the world. Here are some of John’s famous quotes that can be as inspiring to the generations of the future as they were to those of his time!
Quotes by John Muir
Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.
The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us. Thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing.
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.
Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.
There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation’s braggart lords.
Earth has no sorrow that earth can not heal.
When one is alone at night in the depths of these woods, the stillness is at once awful and sublime. Every leaf seems to speak.
I bade adieu to mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God.
About Nature
In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
Come to the woods; for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods.
There are no accidents in Nature, he said. Every motion of the constantly shifting bodies in the world is timed to the occasion for some definite, foreordered end. The flowers blossom in obedience to the same law that marks the course of constellations, and the song of a bird is the echo of a universal symphony.
None of Nature’s landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
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.
Sayings About Mountains
How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity…
The mountains are calling and I must go.
Hiking – I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not hike!
Of all the fire mountains which like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest.
The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains
Who wouldn’t be a mountaineer! Up here all the world’s prizes seem nothing.
Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action.
I’d rather be in the mountains thinking of God, than in church thinking about the mountains.
One day’s exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books.
Doubly happy, however, is the man to whom lofty mountain tops are within reach.
On Nature
This 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.
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!
There is a love of wild nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties
Storms of every sort, torrents, earthquakes, cataclysms, ‘convulsions of nature,’ etc., however mysterious and lawless at first sight they may seem, are only harmonious notes in the song of creation, varied expressions of God’s love.
No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest.
I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.
About Yosemite
Yosemite Park… None can escape its charms. Its natural beauty cleans and warms like a fire, and you will be willing to stay forever in one place like a tree.
It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized, they are mostly hidden.
During my first years in the Sierra, I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite.
The coniferous forests of the Yosemite Park, and of the Sierra in general, surpass all others of their kind in America, or indeed the world, not only in the size and beauty of the trees, but in the number of species assembled together, and the grandeur of the mountains they are growing on.
About Wilderness
The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.
God never made an ugly landscape. All that sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.
Bread without flesh is a good diet, as on many botanical excursions I have proved. Tea also may easily be ignored. Just bread and water and delightful toil is all I need – not unreasonably much, yet one ought to be trained and tempered to enjoy life in these brave wilds in full independence of any particular kind of nourishment.
Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.
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.
To the lover of wilderness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.
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.
Other John Muir Quotes
The world is big and I want to get a good look at it before it gets dark.
I never saw a discontented tree.
Of all the paths you take in life,
make sure a few of them are dirt.
I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
The power of imagination makes us infinite.
Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.
Wander a whole summer if you can. Time will not be taken from the sum of life. Instead of shortening, it will definitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal.
When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.
No right way is easy in this rough world. We must risk our lives to save them.
Famous Lines
As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.
Rocks and waters, etc., are words of God, and so are men. We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love.
The snow is melting into music.
Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.
Sequoia seeds have flat wings, and glint and glance in their flight like a boy’s kite.
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?
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