John Muir Quotes - Page 6

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!

So extraordinary is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert. And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees.

The bat­tle we have fought, and are still fight­ing for the forests is a part of the eter­nal con­flict between right and wrong, and we can­not expect to see the end of it. …So we must count on watch­ing and striv­ing for these trees, and should always be glad to find any­thing so surely good and noble to strive for.

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.

I am learning to live close to the lives of my friends without ever seeing them. No miles of any measurement can separate your soul from mine.

Beside the grand history of the glaciers and their own, the mountain streams sing the history of every avalanche or earthquake and of snow, all easily recognized by the human ear, and every word evoked by the falling leaf and drinking deer, beside a thousand other facts so small and spoken by the stream in so low a voice the human ear cannot hear them.

Happy will be the men who, having the power and the love and the benevolent forecast to [create a park], will do it. They will not be forgotten. The trees and their lovers will sing their praises, and generations yet unborn will rise up and call them blessed.

One can make a day of any size

One can make a day of any size and regulate the rising and setting of his own sun and the brightness of its shining.

Every good thing great and small needs defense

The most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wilderness.

How lavish is Nature building, pulling down, creating, destroying, chasing every material particle from form to form, ever changing, ever beautiful.

Wander here a whole summer, if you can ... Thousands of wild blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted

Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.

Keep in view the common good of the people for all time.

Nature has always something rare to show us... and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof.

The battle we have fought, and are still fighting, for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong.

They tell us that plants are not like man immortal, but are perishable-soul -less. I think that is something that we know exactly nothing about.

Nothing truly wild is unclean.

I must return to the mountains-to Yosemite. I am told that the winter storms there will not be easily borne, but I am bewitched, enchanted, and tomorrow I must start for the great temple to listen to the winter songs and sermons preached and sung only there.

Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains – beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.

Of all the fire mountains which like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest.

Hiking. I don't like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains...the se mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them.

I like to walk, touch living Mother Earth—bare feet best, and thrill every step. Used to envy happy reptiles that had advantage of so much body in contact with earth, bosom to bosom. [We] live with our heels as well as head and most of our pleasure comes in that way.

Man is always and everywhere a blight on the landscape.