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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.
John Muir -
One may 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.
John Muir
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Sheep, like people, are ungovernable when hungry.
John Muir -
Lie down among the pines for a while, then get to plain pure white love-work … to help humanity and other mortals and the Lord.
John Muir -
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.
John Muir -
God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.
John Muir -
I would advise sitting from morning till night under some willow bush on the river bank where there is a wide view. This will be 'doing the valley' far more effectively than riding along trails in constant motion from point to point. The entire valley is made up of 'points of interest.'
John Muir -
I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.
John Muir
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How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!
John Muir -
In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.
John Muir -
Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions.
John Muir -
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 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.
John Muir -
No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.
John Muir
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The dispersal of juniper seeds is effected by the plum and cherry plan of hiring birds at the cost of their board, and thus obtaining the use of a pair of extra good wings.
John Muir -
Of all the mountain ranges I have climbed, I like the Sierra Nevada the best.
John Muir -
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!
John Muir -
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.
John Muir -
Muir describes himself as me the poetico-trampo-geologist-bot & ornith-natural etc etc -!-!-! !
John Muir -
Concerning the Sugar Pine: The wood is deliciously fragrant, and fine in grain and texture; it is of a rich cream-yellow, as if formed of condensed sunbeams.
John Muir
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Many lawless mysteries vanish, and harmonies take their places.
John Muir -
Nature chose for a tool, not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries, the offspring of the sun and sea.
John Muir -
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.
John Muir -
I have heard of Texas pioneers living without bread or anything made from the cereals for months without suffering, using the breast-meat of wild turkeys for bread. Of this kind, they had plenty in the good old days when life, though considered less safe, was fussed over the less.
John Muir