You May Not Be Familiar With the Lake but You Will Know the Mountain Log in Windows

Quotations from John Muir

Selected by Harold Wood

Caution: In that location are an increasing number of misquotes attributed to John Muir widely circulated on the Internet and even in published books. The following quotes, by dissimilarity, accept been carefully vetted by Muir scholars and librarians, with a citation given to the original source. For permission to utilize these quotes, see Copyright Status of John Muir's Writings.
See our John Muir Misquoted folio for more information.

Note on Sources

Climb the mountains and become their good tidings. Nature's peace will menses into you lot as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will accident their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.: -- Our National Parks , 1901, page 56.
Full version of above quote: Walk abroad quietly in whatever direction and taste the freedom of the backwoodsman. Campsite out amid the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature'southward darlings. Climb the mountains and get their proficient tidings, Nature'due south peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their ain freshness into you and the storms their free energy, while cares volition drop off like fall leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, simply nature'south sources never neglect.
Note: there is also a variant misquote of this quotation. Run across our John Muir Misquoted page for more than data.
None of Nature's landscapes are ugly then long equally they are wild. - Our National Parks, (1901), Chapter i, folio 4. Reprinted from The Atlantic Monthly Volume 0081 Result 483 (January 1898) "The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the W" [pp. 15-28, at 17.] (off-site link)
When we contemplate the whole globe equally i corking bead, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flight through infinite with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty. - Travels in Alaska by John Muir, 1915, chapter 1, page v.
Between every two pino trees there is a door leading to a new fashion of life.
- Muir's marginal notation in volume I of Prose Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson (This volume containing marginal notes past John Muir is located at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale Academy. See Albert Saijo, "Me, Muir, and Sierra Nevada", in Reinhabiting a Split up Country: A Bioregional Album of Northern California, edited by Peter Berg, San Francisco, California: Planet Pulsate Foundation, 1978, pages 52-59, at folio 55, and Frederick West. Turner, Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours (1985), page 193.)
Compared with the intense purity and cordiality and beauty of Nature, the nigh delicate refinements and cultures of civilization are gross barbarisms. - Letter to Emily Pelton, Apr 2, 1872, in Badè's Life and Messages of John Muir.

When one is alone at night in the depths of these wood, the stillness is at once awful and sublime. Every leaf seems to speak.
- - John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 295 (quoted in The Wilderness Globe of John Muir, edited by Edwin Way Teale, p. 313.)

Fresh beauty opens i's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and abyss of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its beingness absorbed and appreciated. Information technology is a good affair, therefore, to make short excursions at present then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mount-tops, or in balloons, or even to pitter-patter like worms into nighttime holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the lord's day sees on our render to common everyday beauty.
- The Mountains of California (1894) chapter xv.

Some other glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.
My Starting time Summer in the Sierra , 1911, page 231.

Man must exist made witting of his origin as a child of Nature. Brought into right relationship with the wilderness he would meet that he was not a separate entity endowed with a divine right to subdue his fellow creatures and destroy the common heritage, but rather an integral part of a harmonious whole. He would see that his appropriation of earth's resources beyond his personal needs would only bring imbalance and afford ultimate loss and poverty for all.
- past Linnie Marsh Wolfe, describing Muir'south remedy for man misery in her book, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (1945) page 188.

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would nevertheless exist destroyed -- chased and hunted down as long equally fun or a dollar could exist got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that savage trees establish them; nor would planting avail much towards getting dorsum anything similar the noble primeval forests. ... It took more than than three thousand years to make some of the copse in these Western forest -- copse that are nevertheless standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries ... God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, affliction, avalanches, and a m straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools -- only Uncle Sam can practise that.
- Our National Parks (1901) affiliate 10.

The natural and common is more truly marvelous and mysterious than the so-chosen supernatural. Indeed well-nigh of the miracles we hear of are infinitely less wonderful than the commonest of natural phenomena, when fairly seen.
My First Summertime in the Sierra , chapter 7, 1911, page 133.

Range of Light:
Looking eastward from the meridian of Pacheco Pass one shining morning time, a landscape was displayed that later on all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I take ever beheld. At my anxiety lay the Great Key Valley of California, level and flowery, similar a lake of pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, ane rich furred garden of xanthous Compositae. And from the eastern boundary of this vast aureate blossom-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with low-cal merely wholly equanimous of information technology, like the wall of some celestial city.... So it seemed to me that the Sierra should exist called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, simply the Range of Light. And after x years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the affluent of the alpenglow, and the iridescent spray of countless waterfalls, information technology still seems in a higher place all others the Range of Low-cal.
- The Yosemite (1912) chapter ane.

And so boggling is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending found beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring information technology forth into state and sea, garden and desert. Then the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees....
- My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) affiliate 4.

Surely all God'southward people, nevertheless serious or cruel, smashing or modest, similar to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes - all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them.
- The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, (1913), pages 186-187

Everything is flowing -- going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks too as h2o. Thus the snowfall flows fast or slow in g beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in royal floods conveying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks... While the stars become streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood...in Nature's warm heart.
- My Showtime Summertime in the Sierra (1911) affiliate 10.

Another glorious Sierra solar day in which ane seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know non where. Life seems neither long nor brusque, and we take no more listen to save fourth dimension or make haste than practise the trees and stars. This is truthful freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.
- My Outset Summer in the Sierra (1911) chapter ii.

Past forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs - at present a flood of fire, at present a flood of ice, at present a flood of water; and once more in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life....
- "Mt. Shasta" in Picturesque California (1888-1890), chapter 10 (off-site link) page 148, and in Steep Trails (1918) chapter 3.

This grand prove is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all stale at in one case; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever ascent. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round world rolls.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 438.

Most people are on the earth, not in information technology -- take no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything nigh them -- undiffused, separate, and rigidly lonely similar marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 320.

I used to envy the father of our race, habitation as he did in contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; only I practice so no more, because I have discovered that I too live in "cosmos's dawn." The morning stars still sing together, and the world, not yet half made, becomes more than beautiful every day.
- "Explorations in the Great Tuolumne Cañon," Overland Monthly, August, 1873; and John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 72.

There is a love of wild nature in everybody an ancient mother-love e'er showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties.
- From Muir'southward journals - cited in Wilderness World of John Muir, edited by Edwin Way Teale (1954); and A Passion for Nature by Donald Worster (2008) page 319.

How hard to realize that every camp of men or beast has this glorious starry firmament for a roof! In such places continuing alone on the mountain-top it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make - leaves and moss like the marmots and birds, or tents or piled stone - we all dwell in a house of ane room - the earth with the firmament for its roof - and are sailing the angelic spaces without leaving any rails.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), folio 321.

Only past going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly become into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.
- Letter to wife Louie, July 1888, Life and Messages of John Muir (1924), affiliate 15.

It has been said that trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment rooted in the ground. But they never seem and then to me. I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the footing as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel nigh as far as we practise. They get wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming similar ourselves, traveling with us around the lord's day two million miles a solar day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 313.

If my soul could get away from this so-called prison, be granted all the list of attributes generally bestowed on spirits, my first ramble on spirit-wings would non be amongst the volcanoes of the moon. Nor should I follow the sunbeams to their sources in the sun. I should hover nigh the beauty of our ain good star. I should not get moping among the tombs, not around the artificial desolation of men. I should study Nature's laws in all their crossings and unions; I should follow magnetic streams to their source and follow the shores of our magnetic oceans. I should go among the rays of the aurora, and follow them to their beginnings, and study their dealings and communions with other powers and expressions of matter. And I should go to the very center of our globe and read the whole first-class folio from the get-go. Simply my first journeys would exist into the inner substance of flowers, and amidst the folds and mazes of Yosemite's falls. How grand to move near in the very tissue of falling columns, and in the very birthplace of their heavenly harmonies, looking outward every bit from windows of ever-varying transparency and staining!
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), pages 43-44.

Our crude civilization engenders a multitude of wants, and constabulary-givers are e'er at their wits' end devising. The hall and the theater and the church have been invented, and compulsory education. Why not add together compulsory recreation? ... Our forefathers forged bondage of duty and habit, which bind us notwithstanding our boasted liberty, and we ourselves in desperation add link to link, groaning and making medicinal laws for relief. Yet few think of pure residuum or of the healing power of Nature.

- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 234.

One is constantly reminded of the space lavishness and fertility of Nature -- inexhaustible affluence amid what seems enormous waste matter. And yet when we await into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we larn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from employ to utilise, dazzler to yet higher beauty; and we presently stop to lament waste product and decease, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully picket and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its adjacent advent will be better and more cute than the last.
- My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) chapter 10.

On no subject are our ideas more than warped and pitiable than on death... Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, equally taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blest star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful every bit life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.
- M Mile Walk to the Gulf, p.41-42

Pollution, defilement, squalor are words that never would have been created had man lived conformably to Nature. Birds, insects, bears dice as cleanly and are tending of as beautifully as flies. The woods are full of dead and dying copse, yet needed for their dazzler to complete the beauty of the living.... How beautiful is all Death!
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), pg. 222.

The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death every bit Heimgang-"home-going." So the snow-flowers become home when they melt and menses to the sea, and the stone-ferns, after unrolling their fronds to the light and beautifying the rocks, ringlet them up close once more in the autumn and blend with the soil. Myriads of rejoicing living creatures, daily, hourly, mayhap every moment sink into death'south arms, dust to dust, spirit to spirit-waited on, watched over, noticed simply by their Maker, each arriving at its own Sky-dealt destiny. All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death, wings folded perhaps in the concluding ruddy rays of sunset of the mean solar day they were kickoff tried. Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the lite for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life's feast-all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love. Yet all are our brothers and they enjoy life as we practice, share Heaven'southward blessings with u.s.a., die and are buried in hallowed footing, come up with us out of eternity and return into eternity. "Our lives are rounded with a sleep."
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), p. 339-340.

The snow is melting into music.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 107.

How niggling annotation is taken of the deeds of Nature! What paper publishes her reports? .... Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds, or the written music of water written in river-lines? Who reports and works and means of the clouds, those wondrous creations coming into being every day like freshly upheaved mountains? And what tape is kept of Nature'due south colors - - the clothes she wears - of her birds, her beasts - her live-stock?
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) p. 220.

If one pine were placed in a town square, what admiration it would excite! Yet who is conscious of the pine-tree multitudes in the free woods, though open to everybody?
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) p. 220.

Thousands of tired, nervus-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to notice out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not but every bit fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
- Our National Parks, (1901), chapter 1, page 1.

Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is washed and suffered past her creatures. All scars she heals, whether in rocks or h2o or sky or hearts.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), p. 337.

No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstruction in the style of a correct understanding of the relations which civilisation sustains to wildness equally that which regards the world equally fabricated especially for the uses of man. Every animate being, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet information technology is taught from century to century as something always new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged."
- from "Wild Wool", from "Overland Monthly" (April 1875) reprinted in Steep Trails (1918) chapter 1.

Why should human value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of measurement of creation? And what animal of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit of measurement - the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge. From the dust of the earth, from the mutual elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the aforementioned material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to usa. They are earth-born companions and our boyfriend mortals.... This star, our own practiced globe, made many a successful journey effectually the heavens ere human being was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere homo appeared to claim them. Afterward homo beings accept besides played their function in Creation'south plan, they too may disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion any.
- from A K-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916) - Read longer excerpt.

Oh, these vast, at-home, measureless mount days, inciting at once to work and rest! Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a g windows to testify 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 at-home, he is rich forever.
- My Beginning Summer in the Sierra (1911) chapter 2.

The boxing we have fought, and are still fighting for the forests is a office of the eternal conflict between right and incorrect, and we cannot expect to see the stop of information technology. ... So we must count on watching and
striving for these copse, and should always be glad to detect anything so surely skillful and noble to strive for.
- "The National Parks and Woods Reservations" in a voice communication past John Muir (Proceedings of the Meeting of the Sierra Club Held November 23, 1895.) Published in Sierra Club Bulletin, (1896).

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motility, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.
- from Our National Parks past John Muir (1901) last paragraph Chapter 3

All Nature'south wildness tells the same story: the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring , thundering waves and floods, the silent uprush of sap in plants, storms of every sort, each and all, are the orderly, beauty-making love-beats of Nature'south middle.
- "Three adventures in the Yosemite" (off-site link tounz.org) in "The Century Magazine", vol. LXXXIII, no. 5 (March, 1912) folio 661 [also available on Google Books]; modified slightly in The Yosemite (1912) chapter 4.

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, (Madison: Academy of Wisconsin Press, 1938, republished 1979, folio 439.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
(Muir used this statement in ii different places, with quite different connotations. The one usually intended when the quote is used by itself is probably this one:
"One touch of nature makes the whole earth kin; and it is truly wonderful how beloved-telling the pocket-sized voices of these birds are, and how far they reach through the forest into 1 another'due south hearts and into ours. The tones are so perfectly human and so full of anxious affection, few mountaineers tin fail to be touched past them." This version supports Muir'southward view that at that place is kinship amidst all species.
John Muir, Our National Parks, Chapter seven, 1917.
Muir besides used a slight variation of the same argument, with a rather different context and meaning, in The Prowl of the Corwin:
"Joe's wife came aboard for a last farewell. Later taking him aside and talking with him, the tears running down her cheeks, she left the vessel and went dorsum with some others who had come to trade deerskins, while we sailed away. Ane touch on of nature makes all the world kin, and here were many touches among the wild Chukchis." This version supports Muir's view that all people are brothers, regardless of culture or race.
- The Prowl of the Corwin (1917) chapter 3
Both versions by John Muir echo William Shakespeare, which in turn seems to apply the phrase in a dissimilar context, in Troilus and Cressida, iii, three: "Ane touch of nature makes the whole world kin.")

Every bit long equally I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret the rocks, acquire the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get equally near the heart of the world as I tin can.
- Quoted from Muir Journals (undated fragment, c. 1871) past Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (1945) folio 144.

Notwithstanding the maanificent views opened by scientific discipline into the universe, everything still ends in mystery and infinity.
- "Mysterious Things," quoted in Wurtz, M. J. (2006). John Muir Disrupts a SÃ©ance. John Muir Newsletter, 17(ane), 3â€"4.

How many hearts with warm crimson claret in them are beating nether comprehend of the wood, and how many teeth and optics are shining! A multitude of animal people, intimately related to us, but of whose lives we know virtually zero, are as busy virtually their own affairs every bit we are about ours.
- Our National Parks, (1901), chapter 1.

These temple-destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to take a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their optics to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar. Dam Hetch Hetchy! Besides dam for water-tanks the people'south cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the eye of human being.
- The Yosemite (1912) chapter 15.

How infinitely superior to our physical senses are those of the mind! The spiritual eye sees non merely rivers of water just of air. Information technology sees the crystals of the rock in rapid sympathetic motion, giving enthusiastic obedience to the sun'southward rays, then sinking dorsum to residual in the dark. The whole world is in motion to the eye. So also sounds. We hear but woodpeckers and squirrels and the blitz of turbulent streams. Only imagination gives u.s. the sweet music of tiniest insect wings, enables us to hear, all round the world, the vibration of every needle, the waving of every bole and branch, the sound of stars in circulation like particles in the blood. The Sierra canyons are full of barrage debris -- we hear them boom once again, for we read past sounds from present weather condition. Again nosotros hear the earthquake rock-falls. Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the unreal. Still is true imagination healthful and real, no more likely to mislead than the coarser senses. Indeed, the power of imagination makes the states infinite.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) page 226.

Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting piece of work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both confinement and club. Nowhere will you discover more than company of a soothing peace-be-still kind. Your animal fellow beings, so seldom regarded in civilization, and every rock-brow and mountain, stream, and lake, and every constitute soon come to be regarded as brothers; even one learns to like the storms and clouds and tireless winds. This ane noble park is large plenty and rich plenty for a whole life of written report and artful enjoyment. Information technology is skilful for everybody, no matter how benumbed with care, encrusted with a postal service of business habits like a tree with bark. None can escape its charms. Its natural dazzler cleans and warms like a burn, and you volition be willing to stay forever in one identify like a tree.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) page 350.

Regime protection should exist thrown around every wild grove and wood on the mountains, as information technology is effectually every private orchard, and the copse in public parks. To say nothing of their value as fountains of timber, they are worth infinitely more than than all the gardens and parks of towns.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir , (1938) page 350-351.

Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or piddling nosotros may be able to read them; telling their wanderings even past their scents alone.
- The Mountains of California (1894) affiliate 10.

My fire was in all its glory about midnight, and, having made a bark shed to shelter me from the rain and partially dry my wear, I had nada to do just await and listen and bring together the trees in their hymns and prayers.
- Travels in Alaska (1915) chapter 2.

1 twenty-four hour period'south exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers' plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the homo soul.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) folio 95.

The mountains are fountains of men as well equally of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, take come down from the mountains - mountain dwellers who have grown potent there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir , (1938) pages 315-316.

There is at least a punky spark in my middle and information technology may blaze in this autumn gold, fanned by the Rex. Some of my grandfathers must accept been born on a muirland for there is heather in me, and tinctures of bog juices, that transport me to Cassiope, and oozing through all my veins impel me unhaltingly through endless glacier meadows, seemingly the deeper and danker the ameliorate.
-- Letter to Mrs. Ezra Due south. Carr, location and date indicated as "Squirrelville, Sequoia Co. Nut Time" (c. 1870) as quoted in The Life and Messages of John Muir (1924) affiliate eight.

Plants, animals, and stars are all kept in identify, bridled along appointed ways, with one some other, and through the midst of 1 some other -- killing and being killed, eating and being eaten, in harmonious proportions and quantities.
- from "Wild Wool", from "Overland Monthly" (April 1875) reprinted in Steep Trails (1918) affiliate i.

Wander here a whole summer, if you can. Thousands of God's wild blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days volition get past uncounted. If you are business-tangled, and then encumbered by duty that only weeks can be got out of the heavy-laden year ... give a month at to the lowest degree to this precious reserve. The time will non be taken from the sum of your life. Instead of shortening, it volition indefinitely lengthen information technology and make yous truly immortal.
- Our National Parks (1901) Chapter 1.

Lie down among the pines for a while, then become to plain pure white dear-work ... to assistance humanity and other mortals and the Lord.
-- Letter from John Muir to Mrs. J.D. (Katharine) Hooker, nineteen September 1911, from Para, Brazil, as quoted in The Life and Letters of John Muir (1924) affiliate 17, II
and in John Muir'south Last Journeying (2001) page 67.

Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pino copse. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the forest, even for once, to hear the copse speak for themselves, all difficulties in the fashion of forest preservation would vanish.
- John Muir,
- "The National Parks and Wood Reservations" in a speech by John Muir (Proceedings of the Meeting of the Sierra Club Held Nov 23, 1895.) Published in Sierra Society Bulletin, (1896), v. 1, no. 7, January 1896, pp 271-284, at 282-83.

All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters only little where we go, to highlands or lowlands, forest or plains, on the sea or state or down among the crystals of waves or high in a balloon in the heaven; through all the climates, hot or cold, storms and calms, everywhere and always nosotros are in God's eternal beauty and love. And so universally true is this, the spot where we chance to exist ever seems the best.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) page 299.

[On a Sierra Order Outing, writer Albert Palmer tells of a conversation he had with John Muir on the trail. He asked Muir, "someone told me yous did not approve of the word 'hike.' Is that so?" His blue eyes flashed, and with his Scotch accent he replied]:
" I don't like either the give-and-take or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not hike! Practice yous know the origin of that discussion 'saunter?' Information technology's a cute word. Abroad back in the Middle Ages people used to proceed pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, 'A la sainte terre,' 'To the Holy Land.' So they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and nosotros ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them."
- John Muir, as quoted by Albert W. Palmer, The Mountain Trail and its Message (1911) pages 27-28 - excerpted in A Parable of Sauntering .

I take this one big, well-defined religion for humanity every bit a workman, that the time is coming when every "article of industry" will be as purely a work of God as are these mountains and pino trees and bonnie loving flowers.
- Letter of the alphabet to Mrs. Kate N. Daggett, December 30,1872, in Life and Letters of John Muir , Chapter 10. [

With inexpressible delight you wade out into the grassy sunday-lake, feeling yourself contained on one of Nature's most sacred chambers, withdrawn from the sterner influences of the mountains, secure from all intrusion, secure from yourself, free in the universal beauty. And notwithstanding the scene is so impressively spiritual, and you seem dissolved in it yet everything about you lot is chirapsia with warm, terrestrial human love, delightfully substantial and familiar.
- John Muir, " The Glacier Meadows" Scribner'southward Monthly, February, 1879, from Nature Journal with John Muir edited by Bonnie Johanna Gisel (Poetic Matrix Printing, 2006) and The Glacier Meadows, Chapter seven, of The Mountains of California (1894).

Going to the mountains is going dwelling.
- Our National Parks, (1901), affiliate i, page 1.

The mountains are calling and I must go, and I volition work on while I can, studying endlessly.
- Letter to sister Sarah Galloway, September 3,1873, in Life and Letters of John Muir, Chapter 10 (1923).
[Note that this quote is often truncated, removing the concluding half, as if going on vacation to visit a mere playground. Only reading the full quote, Muir really insisted that going to the mountains was simply a get-go pace. Equally Michael Wurtz points out, "the shortened quote doesn't fully capture John Muir or his desire to sympathise and protect California'due south Yosemite." The reason to get was to study nature, and just as important, piece of work to protect our wilderness areas. Elsewhere in the letter, Muir revealed that he was spending "the flavour in prosecuting my researches," and hoped to make a scientific contribution from his mountain studies, in winter to "piece of work with my pen." Wurtz points out, "These words reveal a man who saw responsibility and purpose as well every bit pleasance in the mountains." Every bit writer Michael Seeger writes, "Perhaps we all would do well to work on studying nature while we can - and if nosotros don't work to protect our lands, nosotros may not have long to practice so."]

Quotations from John Muir were selected by Harold Forest from various sources.
Many thanks to Dan Styer for finding and identifying the sources for many of these quotes. Come across his story about how he helped amend this website, as well every bit the WikiQuotes page of John Muir quotes, on his web page about the Quotable John Muir. On that folio he too provides further groundwork on the source of the "Betwixt every two pine trees..." quote.

A note on sources: Different versions of Muir's best quotes tin exist found in several of his articles, letters, and journal reprints, as well as his books. Generally speaking, books and articles published prior to 1923 are in the public domain; however, note that some of Muir'due south nearly-quoted passages come from the volume John of the Mountains - The Unpublished Journals of John Muir , start published in 1938, copyright renewed 1966 by John Muir Hanna and Ralph Eugene Wolfe. Thus it will be at least 2022 before this work becomes public domain; accordingly the full text of this work is non available on this website because the book is nonetheless under copyright protection. See generally Copyright Status of the Writings of John Muir.

If you know the source for a quote that does not accept i identified, please let me know by email to: harold.wood@sierraclub.org.

For even more than quotes, go to the John Muir National Historic Site Quotes Folio, where quotes are arranged alphabetically by subject. (Offsite link)

and see the WikiQuote website for John Muir Quotes. (off-site link)

CAUTION: At that place are several misquotes of John Muir widely circulated on the Cyberspace and fifty-fifty in published books. See our John Muir Misquoted page for more data.

For a printed resource for finding Muir's quotes, see John Muir in His Own Words: A Book of Quotations Compiled and edited by Peter Browning (Lafayette, CA: Neat Due west Books, 1988).

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Render to Writings of John Muir

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Source: https://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/favorite_quotations.aspx

You May Not Be Familiar With the Lake but You Will Know the Mountain Log in Windows

Quotations from John Muir

Selected by Harold Wood

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