Favorite Quotations John Muir Wild Muir

"Wherever we go in the wilderness, we find more than we seek." ~ John Muir

John Muir

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

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

We are tired, never shaken, over civilized people who are finding Nature is a necessity, that wilderness is freedom, that parks are fountains of life.

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.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man a presumption not supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?

The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thought and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains.

The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

The body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one's flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure glow not explainable.

Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation!

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.