100 Quotes by John Muir
John Muir, a Scottish-American naturalist and environmentalist, left an indelible mark on the conservation movement and the protection of America's natural landscapes. Born in 1838, Muir's deep reverence for the wilderness was forged during his extensive travels and expeditions across North America. He became a vocal advocate for the preservation of natural spaces, co-founding the Sierra Club and championing the idea of national parks. Muir's eloquent writings, like "My First Summer in the Sierra," not only captured the breathtaking beauty of the American wilderness but also conveyed his spiritual connection to nature. His efforts were instrumental in the establishment of Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks. Muir's philosophy, often referred to as "ecocentrism," emphasized the intrinsic value of nature independent of its utility to humans, laying the groundwork for modern environmental ethics. His legacy persists in the ongoing conversation about conservation, the importance of public lands, and the need to balance human progress with the protection of natural ecosystems.
John Muir Quotes
The mountains are calling and I must go. (Meaning)
The power of imagination makes us infinite. (Meaning)
Come to the woods, for here is rest. (Meaning)
Look! Nature is overflowing with the grandeur of God! (Meaning)
Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world. (Meaning)
The sun shines not on us but in us. (Meaning)
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. (Meaning)
Going into the woods, is going home (Meaning)
In God's wildness lies the hope of the world. (Meaning)
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread. (Meaning)
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. (Meaning)
Not blind opposition to progress,but opposition to blind progress. (Meaning)
Going to the mountains is going home. (Meaning)
We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. (Meaning)
How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! (Meaning)
Earth has no sorrow that earth can not heal. (Meaning)
Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm. (Meaning)
Most people are on the world, not in it. (Meaning)
In the woods is perpetual youth. (Meaning)
The power of imagination is infinite. (Meaning)
While cares will drop off like autumn leaves. (Meaning)
One should go to the woods for safety, if for nothing else. (Meaning)
Go quietly alone, no harm will befall you. (Meaning)
Our lives are rounded with a sleep. (Meaning)
John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe. (Meaning)
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".
As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing.
"Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt."
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. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.
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.
I’d rather be in the mountains thinking of God, than in church thinking about the mountains.
The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere.
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.
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.
In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.
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.
Wilderness is a necessity... there must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls.
The mountains are calling and I must go.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
To sit in solitude, to think in solitude with only the music of the stream and the cedar to break the flow of silence, there lies the value of wilderness.
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
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.
God never made an ugly landscape. All that sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.
I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news
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.
The power of imagination makes us infinite.
Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.
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.
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.
Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Here grow the wallflower and the violet. The squirrel will come and sit upon your knee, the logcock will wake you in the morning. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill. Of all the upness accessible to mortals, there is no upness comparable to the mountains.
The United States government has always been proud of the welcome it has extended to good men of every nation, seeking freedom and homes and bread.
Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.
The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.
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.
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.
In God's wildness lies the hope of the world.
Wilderness is not only a haven for native plants and animals but it is also a refuge from society.
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
The sun shines not on us but in us.
We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men.
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.
These beautiful days ... do not exist as mere pictures - maps hung upon the walls of memory to brighten at times when touched by association or will ... They saturate themselves into every part of the body and live always.
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.
Look! Nature is overflowing with the grandeur of God!
Come to the woods, for here is rest.
The world, we are told, was made especially for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?
These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.
Going into the woods, is going home
In the eternal youth of Nature, you may renew your own.
Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature's darlings.
Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.
Going to the mountains is going home.
The battle for conservation will go on endlessly. It is part of the universal battle between right and wrong.
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread.
In God's wildness lies the hope of the world-the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.
No right way is easy in this rough world. We must risk our lives to save them.
One learns that the world, though made, is yet being made; that this is still the morning of creation; that mountains long conceived are now being born, channels traced for coming rivers, basins hollowed for lakes.
Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity.
Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods.
Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts . . .
Wilderness is a necessity ... They will see what I meant in time. There must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls. Food and drink is not all. There is the spiritual. In some it is only a germ, of course, but the germ will grow.
Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.
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 wish I knew where I was going. Doomed to be carried of the spirit into the wilderness, I suppose. I wish I could be more moderate in my desires, but I cannot, and so there is no rest.
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.
So extraordinary is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert. And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees.
Society speaks and all men listen, mountains speak and wise men listen
Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.
The radiance in some places is so great as to be fairly dazzling... every crystal, every flower a window opening into heaven, a mirror reflecting the Creator.
No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite.
Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions.
I never saw a discontented tree.
No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movements of water, or gardening - still all is Beauty!
Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.
Of all the fire mountains which like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest.
Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done and suffered by her creatures. All scars she heals, whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts.
Not blind opposition to progress,but opposition to blind progress.
One can make a day of any size and regulate the rising and setting of his own sun and the brightness of its shining.
There are no accidents in Nature. Every motion of the constantly shifting bodies in the world is timed to the occasion for some definite, fore-ordered end.
All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters but little where we go, to highlands or lowlands, woods or plains, on the sea or land or down among the crystals of waves or high in a balloon in the sky; through all the climates, hot or cold, storms and calms, everywhere and always we are in God's eternal beauty and love. So universally true is this, the spot where we chance to be always seems the best.
I wonder if leaves feel lonely when they see their neighbors falling?
Most people are on the world, not in it-- having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them-- undiffused seporate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but seporate.
There are no accidents in Nature.
I must return to the mountains-to Yosemite. I am told that the winter storms there will not be easily borne, but I am bewitched, enchanted, and tomorrow I must start for the great temple to listen to the winter songs and sermons preached and sung only there.
None of Nature's landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.
In this silent, serene wilderness the weary can gain a heart-bath in perfect peace.
Beside the grand history of the glaciers and their own, the mountain streams sing the history of every avalanche or earthquake and of snow, all easily recognized by the human ear, and every word evoked by the falling leaf and drinking deer, beside a thousand other facts so small and spoken by the stream in so low a voice the human ear cannot hear them.
Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains – beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.
Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.
I might have become a millionaire, but I chose to become a tramp.
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.
We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun,-a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal.
I have a low opinion of books; they are but piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention. No amount of word-making will ever make a single soul to know these mountains. As well seek to warm the naked and frostbitten by lectures on caloric and pictures of flame. One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books.
What wonders lie in every mountain day!
I am well again, I came to life in the cool winds and crystal waters of the mountains.
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.
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 - mountain dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops.
I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer.
Rivers flow not past, but through us; tingling, vibrating, exciting every cell and fiber in our bodies, making them sing and glide.
Look up and down and round about you.!
Wherever we go in the mountains, we find more than we seek.
When I discovered a new plant, I sat down beside it for a minute or a day, to make its acquaintance and hear what it had to tell... I asked the boulders I met, whence they came and whither they were going.
We all flow from one fountain- Soul. All are expressions of one love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.
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.
The battle we have fought, and are still fighting for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong, and we cannot expect to see the end of it. …So we must count on watching and striving for these trees, and should always be glad to find anything so surely good and noble to strive for.
Hiking. I don't like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains...the se mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them.
How lavish is Nature building, pulling down, creating, destroying, chasing every material particle from form to form, ever changing, ever beautiful.
Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest! Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God. Nevermore, however weary, should one faint by the way who gains the blessings of one mountain day; whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever.
How narrow we selfish conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation!
When you tug at a single thing in the universe, you'll find its attached to everything else.
To lovers of the wild, these mountains are not a hundred miles away. Their spiritual power and the goodness of the sky make them near, as a circle of friends. ... You cannot feel yourself out of doors; plain, sky, and mountains ray beauty which you feel. You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp-fire. Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature.
What is worthwhile in life? I think it is worth living and dreaming. If you don't you may be dead anyhow - inside.
I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness.
There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.
One can make a day of any size
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.
I am very blessed. The Valley is full of people, but they do not annoy me. I revolve in pathless places and in higher rocks than the world and his ribbony wife can reach.
God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons.
When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe ... The whole wilderness is unity and interrelation, is alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly.
Man is always and everywhere a blight on the landscape.
The battle we have fought, and are still fighting, for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong.
When a man plants a tree, he plants himself.
We all flow from one fountain.
The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted.
The Big Tree is Nature's forest masterpiece, and so far as I know, the greatest of living things.
We all flow from one fountain- Soul. All are expressions of one love.
Most people are on the world, not in it.
I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found.
"When one tugs at a single thing in nature; he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
Variant - When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
Variant - Tug on anything at all and you'll find it connected to everything else in the universe."
See how God writes history. No technical knowledge is required; only a calm day and a calm mind.
The blessings of one mountain day, whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever.
The mountains are fountains not only of rivers and fertile soil, but of men.
They tell us that plants are not like man immortal, but are perishable-soul -less. I think that is something that we know exactly nothing about.
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.
I always befriended animals and have said many a good word for them. Even to the least-loved mosquitoes I gave many a meal, and told them to go in peace.
No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic repose; others, absolutely sheer or nearly so for thousands of feet, advance beyond their companions in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike, seemingly aware, yet heedless, of everything going on about them.
Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way." ... "Surely a better time must be drawing nigh when godlike human beings will become truly humane, and learn to put their animal fellow mortals in their hearts instead of on their backs or in their dinners.
As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but Nature's sources never fail. Like a generous host, she offers her brimming cups in endless variety, served in a grand hall, the sky its ceiling, the mountains its walls, decorated with glorious paintings and enlivened with bands of music ever playing.
It may not be easy, life isn't easy, but dreams keep you alive.
Earth has no sorrow that earth can not heal.
The most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wilderness.
Every good thing great and small needs defense
Strange the faithless fuss made about taking a walk in the safest and pleasantest of all places, a wilderness.
Happy will be the men who, having the power and the love and the benevolent forecast to [create a park], will do it. They will not be forgotten. The trees and their lovers will sing their praises, and generations yet unborn will rise up and call them blessed.
― John Muir Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
