John Muir

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

Every natural object is a conductor of divinity and only by coming into contact with them... may we be filled with the Holy Ghost.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

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

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

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

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Natures peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.

Sheep, like people, are ungovernable when hungry.

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.

To the lover of wilderness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.

To myself, mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery; in them, and in the forms of inferior landscape that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up.

Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows in craggy garden nooks full of natures darlings.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God's mountains.

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

As soon as a redwood is cut down or burned, it sends up a crowd of eager, hopeful shoots, which, if allowed to grow, would in a few decades attain a height of a hundred feet, and the strongest of them would finally become giants as great as the original tree.

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

The world, we are told, was made especially for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God's universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

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

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.

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

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.

One can make a day of any size.

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

No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.

I bade adieu to mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God.

By forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs now a flood of fire now a flood of ice now a flood of water and again in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life.

We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.

The tide of visitors will float slowly about the bottom of the valley as harmless scum collecting in hotel and saloon eddies, leaving the rocks and falls eloquent as ever.

The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round.

The wild Indian power of escaping observation, even where there is little or no cover to hide in, was probably slowly acquired in hard hunting and fighting lessons while trying to approach game, take enemies by surprise, or get safely away when compelled to retreat.

The more I see of deer, the more I admire them as mountaineers. They make their way into the heart of the roughest solitudes with smooth reserve of strength, through dense belts of brush and forest encumbered with fallen trees and boulder piles, across canons, roaring streams, and snow-fields, ever showing forth beauty and courage.

One may as well dam for water tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.

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.

When California was wild it was the floweriest part of the continent.

Going to the mountains is going home.

Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature's forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.

Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Natures peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.

When California was wild, it was the floweriest part of the continent.

The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning, it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.

Rocks and waters, etc., are words of God, and so are men. We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love.

Hidden in the glorious wildness like unmined gold.

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.

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.

The redwood is one of the few conifers that sprout from the stump and roots, and it declares itself willing to begin immediately to repair the damage of the lumberman and also that of the forest-burner.

Of all the mountain ranges I have climbed, I like the Sierra Nevada the best.

Wilderness is a necessity there must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls.

The glories of a mountain campfire are far greater than may be guessed.... One can make a day of any size and regulate the rising and setting of his own sun and the brightness of its shining.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

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

The practical importance of the preservation of our forests is augmented by their relations to climate, soil and streams.

Storms of every sort, torrents, earthquakes, cataclysms, 'convulsions of nature,' etc., however mysterious and lawless at first sight they may seem, are only harmonious notes in the song of creation, varied expressions of God's love.

Take a course in good water and air and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly alone no harm will befall you.

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

t is by far the grandest of all the special temples of Nature I was ever permitted to enter.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

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.

Come to the woods for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!

But in every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks.

The mountains are calling and I must go.

Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.

The dispersal of juniper seeds is effected by the plum and cherry plan of hiring birds at the cost of their board, and thus obtaining the use of a pair of extra good wings.

The redwood is the glory of the Coast Range. It extends along the western slope, in a nearly continuous belt about ten miles wide, from beyond the Oregon boundary to the south of Santa Cruz, a distance of nearly four hundred miles, and in massive, sustained grandeur and closeness of growth surpasses all the other timber woods of the world.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Natures peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.

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

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

In most mills, only the best portions of the best trees are used, while the ruins are left on the ground to feed great fires which kill much of what is left of the less desirable timber, together with the seedlings on which the permanence of the forest depends.

Rivers flow not past, but through us; tingling, vibrating, exciting every cell and fiber in our bodies, making them sing and glide.

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain - a magic wand in Nature's hand - every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation's braggart lords.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

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

Sequoia seeds have flat wings, and glint and glance in their flight like a boy's kite.

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.

It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized, they are mostly hidden.

During my first years in the Sierra, I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

Beetles and butterflies are sometimes restricted to small areas. Each mountain in a range, and even the different zones of a mountain, may have its own peculiar species. But the house-fly seems to be everywhere. I wonder if any island in mid-ocean is flyless.

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.