John Muir Quotes
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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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Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.
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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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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.
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Living artificially in towns, we are sickly, and never come to know ourselves.
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Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions.
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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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One touch of nature makes all the world kin.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Of all the mountain ranges I have climbed, I like the Sierra Nevada the best.
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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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Good walkers can go anywhere in these hospitable mountains without artificial ways.
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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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Sit down in climbing, and hear the pines sing.
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Muir describes himself as me the poetico-trampo-geologist-bot & ornith-natural etc etc -!-!-! !
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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.
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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.