John Muir Quotes

“Hidden in the glorious wildness like unmined gold.”
― John Muir

“Nothing truly wild is unclean.”
― John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

“When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world.”
― John Muir

“Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.”
― John Muir, The Wilderness World of John Muir

“Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings.”
― John Muir, The Wilderness World of John Muir

“Raindrops blossom brilliantly in the rainbow, and change to flowers in the sod, but snow comes in full flower direct from the dark, frozen sky.”
― John Muir, The Mountains of California

“It has always been my understanding that truth and freedom can only exist in wild places.”
― Daniel J. Rice, This Side of a Wilderness

“...full of God's thoughts, a place of peace and safety amid the most exalted grandeur and enthusiastic action, a new song, a place of beginnings abounding in first lessons of life, mountain building, eternal, invincible, unbreakable order; with sermons in stone, storms, trees, flowers, and animals brimful with humanity.”
― John Muir

“The making of gardens and parks goes on with civilization all over the world, and they increase both in size and number as their value is recognized. Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little windowsill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National Parks—the Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc.—Nature's sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world. Nevertheless, like anything else worth while, from the very beginning, however well guarded, they have always been subject to attack by despoiling gain-seekers and mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to Senators, eagerly trying to make everything immediately and selfishly commercial, with schemes disguised in smug-smiling philanthropy, industriously, sham-piously crying, "Conservation, conservation, panutilization," that man and beast may be fed and the dear Nation made great. Thus long ago a few enterprising merchants utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead of a place of prayer, changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves; and earlier still, the first forest reservation, including only one tree, was likewise despoiled. Ever since the establishment of the Yosemite National Park, strife has been going on around its borders and I suppose this will go on as part of the universal battle between right and wrong, however much of its boundaries may be shorn, or its wild beauty destroyed.”
― John Muir, The Yosemite

“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.”
― John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

“We are not here to exist; we are here to live, to face death and stare it down. We are here to trust in God and to embrace this world in all its quiet and violent beauty, to break down the walls of our own prejudices and believe in something greater than ourselves. We are here to paddle into our worst fears and come out the other side to discover glaciers, to meet them face-to-face, and to celebrate a sense of wonder and God's plan that we find only in Nature.”
― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How A Visionary And The Glaciers Of Alaska Changed America

“People are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home, that wilderness is a necessity.”
― John Muir

“Among those who could read, books were prized possessions. Words on paper were powerful magic, seductive as music, sharp as a knife at times, or gentle as a kiss. Friendships and love affairs blossomed as men and women read to each other in summer meadows and winter kitchens. Pages were ambrosia in their hands. A new novel or collection of poems was something everybody talked about. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Bronte, Austen, Dickens, Keats, Emerson, Cooper, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Twain. To read these authors was to go on a grand adventure and see things as you never had before, see yourself as you never had before.”
― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How A Visionary And The Glaciers Of Alaska Changed America

“Parks benefit everyone. And those (men) who approach nature with arrogance instead of reverence may fail to reap the rewards available to all who recognize that the journeys are those made with the mind, not the body.

'When a mountain is climbed, it is said to be conquered--(may) as well say a man is conquered when a fly (lands) on his head.'
-John Muir”
― Ron Lizzi, Go Outside and Come Back Better: Benefits from Nature That Everyone Should Know

“You are yourself a Sequoia. Stop and get acquainted with your brethren... It will do you good.”
― John Muir

“You'll never make up what you lost today, I've been wandering through a thousand rooms of God's crystal temple. I've been a thousand feet down in the crevasses, with matchless domes and sculpted figures and carved ice-work all about me. Solomon's marble and ivory palaces were nothing to it. Such purity, such color, such delicate beauty! I was tempted to stay there and feed my soul, and softly freeze, until I would become part of the glacier. What a great death that would be.”
― John Muir

“He felt himself dissolving down into the great mass of the mountain, tumbling slowly down through the rock. The mountain mumbled in his ear, "I am." With a puff of its cheeks it blew him aloft, threw his atoms out into the sky. They tumbled off on the wind and dispersed to every point of the compass . . .until his body and California were contiguous, united, one. Only his vision remained separate.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Remaking History and Other Stories

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread.”
― John Muir