John Muir Quotes

“And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.”

“Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.”

“As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”

“Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.”

“Earth has no sorrow that earth can not heal.”

“Going to the mountains is going home.”

“Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.”

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”

“In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks.”

“Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.”

“The power of imagination makes us infinite.”

“The sun shines not on us but in us.”

“The world's big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.”

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

“The world, we are told, was made especially for man — a presumption not supported by all the facts.”

“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.”

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.”