John Muir
I used to envy the father of our race, dwelling as he did in contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so no more, because I have discovered that I also live in "creation's dawn." The morning stars still sing together, and the world, not yet half made, becomes more beautiful every day.Collection: Beauty
Many of Nature's finest lessons are to be found in her storms, and if careful to keep in right relations with them, we may go safely abroad with them, rejoicing in the grandeur and beauty of their works and ways.Collection: Storm
I should study Nature's laws in all their crossings and unions; I should follow magnetic streams to their source and follow the shores of our magnetic oceans. I should go among the rays of the aurora, and follow them to their beginnings, and study their dealings and communications with other powers and expressions of matter.Collection: Travel
I have a low opinion of books: they are piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention.Collection: Book
Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothingCollection: Adventure
I made these Sierra trips, carrying only a sackful of bread with a little tea and sugar, and was thus independent and free.Collection: Independent
Going to the mountains is going home.Collection: Home
Yosemite Park... None can escape its charms. Its natural beauty cleans and warms like a fire, and you will be willing to stay forever in one place like a tree.Collection: Fire
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?Collection: Humility
In God's wildness lies the hope of the world-the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.Collection: Lying
The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted.Collection: God
To lovers of the wild, these mountains are not a hundred miles away. Their spiritual power and the goodness of the sky make them near, as a circle of friends. ... You cannot feel yourself out of doors; plain, sky, and mountains ray beauty which you feel. You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp-fire. Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature.Collection: Spiritual
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. Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves. No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.Collection: Life
The blessings of one mountain day, whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever.Collection: Short Life
No right way is easy in this rough world. We must risk our lives to save them.Collection: Life
I never saw a discontented tree.Collection: Adventure
No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite.Collection: Hands
Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.Collection: Spring
I am well again, I came to life in the cool winds and crystal waters of the mountains.Collection: Nature
I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness.Collection: People
I always befriended animals and have said many a good word for them. Even to the least-loved mosquitoes I gave many a meal, and told them to go in peace.Collection: Animal
See how God writes history. No technical knowledge is required; only a calm day and a calm mind.Collection: Writing
One learns that the world, though made, is yet being made; that this is still the morning of creation; that mountains long conceived are now being born, channels traced for coming rivers, basins hollowed for lakes.Collection: Morning
The mountains are fountains not only of rivers and fertile soil, but of men.Collection: Men
No words will ever describe the exquisite beauty and charm of this mountain park – Nature’s landscape garden at once tenderly beautiful and sublime. No wonder it draws nature-lovers from all over the world.Collection: Beautiful
Look up and down and round about you.!Collection: Looks
Most people are on the world, not in it-- having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them-- undiffused seporate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but seporate.Collection: Sympathy
We all flow from one fountain- Soul. All are expressions of one love.Collection: Expression
We all flow from one fountain- Soul. All are expressions of one love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.Collection: God
We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun,-a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal.Collection: Nature
The great wilds of our country, once held to be boundless and inexhaustible, are being rapidly invaded and overrun in every direction, and everything destructible in them is being destroyed. How far destruction may go it is not easy to guess. Every landscape, low and high, seems doomed to be trampled and harried. Even the sky is not safe from scath-blurred and blackened whole summers together with the smoke of fires that devour the woods.Collection: Summer
Wander a whole summer if you can. Thousands of God's blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted. If you are business-tangled and so burdened by duty that only weeks can be got out of the heavy laden year, give a month at least. The time will not be taken from the sum of life. Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal.Collection: Summer
Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts . . .Collection: Heart
What is worthwhile in life? I think it is worth living and dreaming. If you don't you may be dead anyhow - inside.Collection: Dream
The Big Tree is Nature's forest masterpiece, and so far as I know, the greatest of living things.Collection: Tree
Most people are on the world, not in it.Collection: Adventure
I wish I knew where I was going. Doomed to be carried of the spirit into the wilderness, I suppose. I wish I could be more moderate in my desires, but I cannot, and so there is no rest.Collection: Destiny
When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe ... The whole wilderness is unity and interrelation, is alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly.Collection: Science
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 window-sill 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.Collection: Beauty
The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains - mountain dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops.Collection: Strong
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed-chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got of their bark hides.Collection: Running
Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.Collection: Life
I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found.Collection: Air
To ask me whether I could endure to live without friends is absurd. It is easy enough to live out of material sight of friends, but to live without human love is impossible.Collection: Friendship
There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.Collection: Unity
I have a low opinion of books; they are but piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention. No amount of word-making will ever make a single soul to know these mountains. As well seek to warm the naked and frostbitten by lectures on caloric and pictures of flame. One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books.Collection: Book
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!Collection: Stars
Tug on anything in nature and you will find it connected to everything else.Collection: Inspiring
None of Nature's landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.Collection: Adventure