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 alike.
-
The Yosemite (1912), page 256.
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.
None of Nature's landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild. - Our National Parks, (1901), page 4.
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.
- Travels in Alaska by John Muir, 1915, chapter 1, page 5.
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
- John of the Mountains (1938), page 313.
I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found.
There is not a "fragment" in all nature, for every relative
fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.
- A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916), page 164.
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.
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!
"God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful,
so long as it is wild."
- Atlantic Monthly, January 1869.
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.
-
John of the Mountains, (1938) page 317.
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.
- June 9, 1872 letter to Miss Catharine Merrill, from New Sentinel Hotel,
Yosemite Valley, in Badè's Life and Letters of John Muir.
The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes, the heart of the people is always right.
Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark 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 sun sees on our return to common everyday beauty.
Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to
the tongue.
My First Summer
in the Sierra
, 1911, page 231.
Brought into right relationships with the wilderness, man would see that his appropriation of Earth's resources beyond his personal needs would only bring imbalance and begat ultimate loss and poverty by all.
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 out of their bark hides. Branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods - trees that are still 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, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools - only Uncle Sam can do that.
Range of Light:
Looking eastward from the summit of Pacheco Pass one shining
morning, a landscape was displayed that after all my
wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever
beheld. At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of
California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine,
forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, one rich
furred garden of yellow Compositae. And from the eastern
boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty
Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so
radiant, it seemed not clothed with light but wholly
composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city....
Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not
the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after
ten 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 flush of the alpenglow,
and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems
above all others the Range of Light.
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....
Surely all God's people, however serious or savage, great or
small, like 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 as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks... While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood...in Nature's warm heart.
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.
By forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs - now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life....
This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere;
the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever
falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset,
eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and
islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
-
John of the Mountains, (1938), page 438.
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.
I used to envy the father of our race, dwelling as he did in
contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I
do so no more, because I have discovered that I also live in
"creation's dawn." The morning stars still sing together,
and the world, not yet half made, becomes more beautiful
every day.
"Explorations in the Great Tuolumne Cañon," Overland Monthly, August, 1873;
John of the Mountains, (1938), page 72.
There is a love of wild nature in everybody an ancient mother-love ever showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties.
How hard to realize that every camp of men or beast has this glorious starry firmament for a roof! In such places standing 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 one room - the world with the firmament for its roof - and are sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track.
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.
- Letter to wife Louie, July 1888, Life and
Letters of John Muir 1924.
It has been said that trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment rooted in the ground. But they never seem so to me. 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. They 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!
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 not be among the volcanoes of the moon. Nor should I follow the sunbeams to their sources in the sun. I should hover about the beauty of our own good star. I should not go 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 splendid page from the beginning. But my first journeys would be into the inner substance of flowers, and among the folds and mazes of Yosemite's falls. How grand to move about in the very tissue of falling columns, and in the very birthplace of their heavenly harmonies, looking outward as from windows of ever-varying transparency and staining!
Our crude civilization engenders a multitude of wants, and law-givers are ever at their wit's end devising. The hall and the theater and the church have been invented, and compulsory education. Why not add compulsory recreation? Our forefathers forged chains of duty and habit, which bind us notwithstanding our boasted freedom, and we ourselves in desperation add link to link, groaning and making medicinal laws for relief. Yet few think of pure rest or of the healing power of Nature.
One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature -- inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.
On no subject are our ideas more 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, 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, and that the grave has no
victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.
- Thousand 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 die as cleanly and
are disposed of as beautifully as flies. The woods are full of dead and dying
trees, yet needed for their beauty to complete the beauty of the living....
How beautiful is all Death!
- John
of the Mountains, pg. 222.
The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death as Heimgang-"home-going." So
the snow-flowers go home when they melt and flow to the sea, and the rock-ferns,
after unrolling their fronds to the light and beautifying the rocks, roll them
up close again in the autumn and blend with the soil. Myriads of rejoicing
living creatures, daily, hourly, perhaps every moment sink into death’s
arms, dust to dust, spirit to spirit-waited on, watched over, noticed only
by their Maker, each arriving at its own Heaven-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 last red rays of sunset of the day they were first tried.
Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces
to the light 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 do, share Heaven’s blessings with
us, die and are buried in hallowed ground, come 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, p. 339-340.
Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds or the music of water written in river-lines?
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; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
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.
No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in a way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains as to wilderness, as that which declares that the world was made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged."
- from "Wild Wool", 1875.
Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit
of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to
make is not essential to the completeness of that unit - 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 common elementary fund, the
Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other
creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions
and our fellow mortals.... This star, our own good earth, made many a successful
journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures
enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them.
After human beings have also played their part in Creation's plan, they
too may disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion
whatever.
- from A
Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916) - Read longer excerpt.
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.
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."
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.
All Nature's wildness tells the same story: the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring , thundering waves and floods, the silent uproot of sap in plants, storms of every sort, each and all, are the orderly, beauty-making love-beats of Nature's heart.
I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay
out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
- from John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1938, republished 1979, page 439.
One touch of nature...makes all the world kin.
(Quoting William Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida, iii. 3.)
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.
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. Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.
How infinitely superior to our physical senses are those of the mind! The spiritual eye sees not only rivers of water but of air. It sees the crystals of the rock in rapid sympathetic motion, giving enthusiastic obedience to the sun's rays, then sinking back to rest in the night. The whole world is in motion to the center. So also sounds. We hear only woodpeckers and squirrels and the rush of turbulent streams. But imagination gives us the sweet music of tiniest insect wings, enables us to hear, all around 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 avalanche debris - we hear them boom again, and we read the past sounds from present conditions. Again we hear the earthquake rock-falls. Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the unreal. Yet is true imagination healthful and real, no more likely to mislead than the coarse senses. Indeed, the power of imagination makes us infinite.
Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both solitude and society. Nowhere will you find more 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 plant soon come to be regarded as brothers; even one learns to like the storms and clouds and tireless winds. This one noble park is big enough and rich enough for a whole life of study and aesthetic enjoyment. It is good for everybody, no matter how benumbed with care, encrusted with a mail of business habits like a tree with bark. 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.
Government protection should be thrown around every wild grove and forest on the mountains, as it is around every private orchard, and the trees in public parks. To say nothing of their value as fountains of timber, they are worth infinitely more than all the gardens and parks of towns.
Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or little we may be able to read them; telling their wanderings ever by their accents alone.
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 clothing, I had nothing to do but look and listen and join the trees in their hymns and prayers.
One day's 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 human soul.
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.
There is at least a punky spark in my heart and it may blaze in this autumn gold, fanned by the King. Some of my grandfathers must have been born on a muirland for there is heather in me, and tinctures of bog juices, that send me to Cassiope, and oozing through all my veins impel me unhaltingly through endless glacier meadows, seemingly the deeper and danker the better.
Plants, animals, and stars are all kept in place, bridled along appointed ways, with one another, and through the midst of one another -- killing and being killed, eating and being eaten, in harmonious proportions and quantities.
Wander a whole summer if you can. Thousands of God's blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted. If you are business-tangled and so burdened by duty that only weeks can be got out of the heavy laden year, give a month at least. The time will not be taken from the sum of life. Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal.
Lie down among the pines for a while then get to plain pure white love-work to help humanity and other mortals.
Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons
on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got
into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all
difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.
- John Muir, "The National Parks and Forest Reservations," Sierra
Club Bulletin, v. 1, no. 7, January 1896, pp 271-284, at 282-83.
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.
Hiking - I don't like either the word or the thing. People ought
to saunter in the mountains - not hike! Do you know the origin of that
word 'saunter?' It's a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people
used to go on 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.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers
or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter
through them reverently, not 'hike' through them.
- John Muir, quoted by Albert Palmer in A
Parable of Sauntering .
With inexpressible delight you wade out into the grassy sun-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 is beating with warm, terrestrial human love,
delightfully substantial and familiar.
- John Muir, "
The Glacier Meadows" Scribner's Monthly, February, 1879, from Nature
Journal with John Muir edited by Bonnie Johana Gisel (Poetic Matrix Press,
2006) and The Glacier Meadows,
Chapter 7, of The Mountains
of California (1894).
Going to the mountains is going home.
Quotations from John Muir were selected by Harold Wood from various sources.
A note on sources: Most sources are not noted, since I am unsure of the original source, as they were derived from several different materials and reprints. If you need to find the source, try doing a search on this website, using a key phrase from the quote you are trying to find. If it is in one of Muir's books that we have online, you should find it. Recognize, however, that different versions of Muir's best quotes can be found inseveral of his articles, letters, and journal reprints such as John of the Mountains which are not available on this website.
If you know the source for a quote that does not have one identified, please let me know by e-mail to: harold.wood@sierraclub.org.
For even more quotes, go to the John Muir National Historic Site Quotes Page, where quotes are arranged alphabetically by subject. (Offsite link)
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: Great West Books, 1988).
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