John Muir Quotes
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Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature's forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.
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Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
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Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions.
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To the sane and free it will hardly seem necessary to cross the continent in search of wild beauty, however easy the way, for they find it in abundance wherever they chance to be.
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I did find Calypso hotdog - but only once, far in the depths of the very wildest of Canadian dark woods, near those high, cold, moss-covered swamps. … I felt as if I were in the presence of superior beings who loved me and beckoned me to come. I sat down beside them and wept for joy.
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The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
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Cloudy all day. Showery on mtns. to eastward at noon. Fine thunderstorm evening, with grand display of zigzag intensely vivid & very near with keen cracks and grand trailing rain … Visited Elk ranch. About sixty old & young. Old bulls carry horns in noble style & grand airs.
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God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.
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Sit down in climbing, and hear the pines sing.
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The redwood is the glory of the Coast Range. It extends along the western slope, in a nearly continuous belt about ten miles wide, from beyond the Oregon boundary to the south of Santa Cruz, a distance of nearly four hundred miles, and in massive, sustained grandeur and closeness of growth surpasses all the other timber woods of the world.
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Good walkers can go anywhere in these hospitable mountains without artificial ways.
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Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.
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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!
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Of all the mountain ranges I have climbed, I like the Sierra Nevada the best.
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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.
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One of the best ways to see tree flowers is to climb one of the tallest trees and to get into close, tingling touch with them, and then look broad.
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Every other civilized nation in the world has been compelled to care for its forests, and so must we if waste and destruction are not to go on to the bitter end, leaving America as barren as Palestine or Spain.
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Concerning the founding of the Sierra Club: Hoping that we will be able to do something for wildness and make the mountains glad.
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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.
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Living artificially in towns, we are sickly, and never come to know ourselves.
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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.
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Sheep, like people, are ungovernable when hungry.
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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.
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If I were so time-poor as to have only one day to spend in Yosemite I should start at daybreak, say at three o'clock in midsummer, with a pocketful of any sort of dry breakfast stuff, for Glacier Point, Sentinel Dome, the head of Illilouette Fall, Nevada Fall, the top of Liberty Cap, Vernal Fall and the wild boulder-choked River Cañon.