Quotes by John Muir

Contemplating the lace-like fabric of streams outspread over the mountains, we are reminded that everything is flowing - going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water.  Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks both in solution and in the form of mud particles, sand, pebbles, and boulders.  Rocks flow from volcanoes like water from springs, and animals flock together and flow in currents modified by stepping, leaping, gliding, flying, swimming, etc.  While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood globules in Nature's warm heart.

The world, we are told, was made especially for humans - a presumption not supported by all the facts...  Why should humanity value itself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?  And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit - the cosmos?  The universe would be incomplete without humans; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.  From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo Sapiens.  From the same material God has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us.  They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals.

The mountains are calling and I must go

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

One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books.

"We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men... trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense.
They make journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true;but our own little comings and goings are only little more than tree-wavings- many of them not so much."

~John Muir~

"When we try to pick up anything by itself we find it is attached to everything in the Universe." 

If the Creator were to bestow a new set of senses upon us, or slightly remodel the present ones, leaving all the rest of nature unchanged, we should never doubt we were in another world, and so in strict reality we should be, just as if all the world besides our senses were changed.

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

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