John Muir Quotes
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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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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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Living artificially in towns, we are sickly, and never come to know ourselves.
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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.
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This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest … in our magnificent National Parks … Nature's sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world.
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This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
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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.
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April 21. My birthday - I am told the fifty-seventh, and yet I feel only a boy. Must make haste and get my work done ere the night falls. Made an excursion with the babes to Mount Wanda.
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One touch of nature makes all the world kin.
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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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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 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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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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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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We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.
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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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Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions.
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Good walkers can go anywhere in these hospitable mountains without artificial ways.
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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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Muir describes himself as me the poetico-trampo-geologist-bot & ornith-natural etc etc -!-!-! !
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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.
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Sit down in climbing, and hear the pines sing.
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Of all the mountain ranges I have climbed, I like the Sierra Nevada the best.
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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.