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; and that mountain parks
and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber
and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
- Our National Parks, (1901),
chapter 1, page 1.
Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done
and suffered by her creatures. All scars she heals, whether
in rocks or water or sky or hearts.
- John
of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), p. 337.
No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable
an obstacle in the way of a right understanding of the relations which
culture sustains to wildness as that which regards the world as made
especially for the uses of man. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts
it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century
as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the
enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged."
- from "Wild Wool", from "Overland Monthly" (April 1875) reprinted in Steep Trails (1918) chapter 1.
Why should man value himself 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 man; 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 he has made every other
creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions
and our fellow mortals.... This star, our own good earth, made many a successful
journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures
enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them.
After human beings have also played their part in Creation's plan, they
too may disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion
whatever.
- from A
Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916) - Read longer excerpt.
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.
- My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) chapter 2.
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.
- "The National Parks and Forest Reservations" in a speech by John Muir (Proceedings of the Meeting of the Sierra Club Held November 23, 1895.)
Published in Sierra Club Bulletin, (1896).
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.
- from Our National Parks by John Muir (1901) last paragraph Chapter 3
All Nature's wildness tells the same story: the shocks and
outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring ,
thundering waves and floods, the silent uprush of sap in
plants, storms of every sort, each and all, are the orderly,
beauty-making love-beats of Nature's heart.
- "Three adventures in the Yosemite" (off-site link tounz.org) in "The Century Magazine",
vol. LXXXIII, no. 5 (March, 1912) page 661 [also available on Google Books];
modified slightly in The Yosemite (1912) chapter 4.
I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay
out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
- John
of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1938, republished 1979, page 439.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
(Muir used this statement in two different places, with quite different connotations. The one usually intended when the quote is used by itself is probably this one:
"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin; and it is truly wonderful how love-telling the small voices of these birds are, and how far they reach through the woods into one another's hearts and into ours. The tones are so perfectly human and so full of anxious affection, few mountaineers can fail to be touched by them." This version supports Muir's view that there is kinship among all species.
John Muir, Our National Parks, Chapter 7, 1917.
Muir also used a slight variation of the same statement, with a rather different context and meaning, in The Cruise of the Corwin:
"Joe's wife came aboard for a final farewell. After taking him aside and talking with him, the tears running down her cheeks, she left the vessel and went back with some others who had come to trade deerskins, while we sailed away. One touch of nature makes all the world kin, and here were many touches among the wild Chukchis." This version supports Muir's view that all people are brothers, regardless of culture or race.
- The Cruise of the Corwin (1917) chapter 3
Both versions by John Muir echo William Shakespeare, which in turn seems to use the phrase in a different context, in Troilus and Cressida, iii, 3: "One touch
of nature makes the whole world kin.")
As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds
sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of
flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with
the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of
the world as I can.
- Quoted from Muir Journals (undated fragment, c. 1871) by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (1945) page 144.
Notwithstanding the maanificent views opened by science into the universe, everything still ends in mystery and infinity.
- "Mysterious Things," quoted in Wurtz, M. J. (2006). John Muir Disrupts a Séance. John Muir Newsletter, 17(1), 3–4.
How many hearts with warm red blood in them are beating under cover of
the woods, and how many teeth and eyes are shining! A multitude of animal
people, intimately related to us, but of whose lives we know almost nothing,
are as busy about their own affairs as we are about ours.
- Our National Parks, (1901), chapter 1.
These temple-destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism,
seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of
lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to
the Almighty Dollar. Dam Hetch Hetchy! 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.
- The Yosemite (1912) chapter 15.
How infinitely superior to our physical senses are those of the mind!
The spiritual eye sees not only rivers of water but of air. It sees
the crystals of the rock in rapid sympathetic motion, giving
enthusiastic obedience to the sun's rays, then sinking back to rest in
the night. The whole world is in motion to the center. So also sounds.
We hear only woodpeckers and squirrels and the rush of turbulent
streams. But imagination gives us the sweet music of tiniest insect
wings, enables us to hear, all round the world, the vibration of every
needle, the waving of every bole and branch, the sound of stars in
circulation like particles in the blood. The Sierra canyons are full
of avalanche debris -- we hear them boom again, for we read past
sounds from present conditions. Again we hear the earthquake
rock-falls. Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the
unreal. Yet is true imagination healthful and real, no more likely to
mislead than the coarser senses. Indeed, the power of imagination
makes us infinite.
- John
of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) page 226.
Hiking - "I don't like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not hike! Do you know the origin of that word 'saunter?' It's a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, 'A la sainte terre, 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them."
- "A Parable of Sauntering" from The Mountain Trail and Its Message by Albert W. Palmer (1911) (quoting Muir)
Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and
weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the
advantages of both solitude and society. Nowhere will you find more
company of a soothing peace-be-still kind. Your animal fellow beings,
so seldom regarded in civilization, and every rock-brow and mountain,
stream, and lake, and every plant soon come to be regarded as
brothers; even one learns to like the storms and clouds and tireless
winds. This one noble park is big enough and rich enough for a whole
life of study and aesthetic enjoyment. It is good for everybody, no
matter how benumbed with care, encrusted with a mail of business
habits like a tree with bark. 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.
- John
of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) page 350.
Government protection should be thrown around every wild
grove and forest on the mountains, as it is around every
private orchard, and the trees in public parks. To say
nothing of their value as fountains of timber, they are
worth infinitely more than all the gardens and parks of
towns.
- John
of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) page 350-351.
Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or little we
may be able to read them; telling their wanderings even by their
scents alone.
- The Mountains of California (1894) chapter 10.
My fire was in all its glory about midnight, and, having
made a bark shed to shelter me from the rain and partially
dry my clothing, I had nothing to do but look and listen and
join the trees in their hymns and prayers.
- Travels in Alaska (1915) chapter 2.
One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of
books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon
photographers' plates. No earthly chemicals are so
sensitive as those of the human soul.
- John
of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) page 95.
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.
- John
of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) pages 315-316.
There is at least a punky spark in my heart and it may blaze in this autumn gold, fanned by the King. Some of my grandfathers must have been born on a muirland for there is heather in me, and tinctures of bog juices, that send me to Cassiope, and oozing through all my veins impel me unhaltingly through endless glacier meadows, seemingly the deeper and danker the better.
-- Letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, location and date indicated as "Squirrelville, Sequoia Co. Nut Time" (c. 1870) as quoted in The Life and Letters of
John Muir (1924) chapter 8.
Plants, animals, and stars are all kept in place, bridled along appointed ways, with one another, and through the midst of one another -- killing and being killed, eating and being eaten, in harmonious proportions and quantities.
- from "Wild Wool", from "Overland Monthly" (April 1875) reprinted in Steep Trails (1918) chapter 1.
Wander here a whole summer, if you can. Thousands of God's wild
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 to this precious reserve. The time will
not be taken from the sum of your life. Instead of shortening, it will
indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal.
- Our National Parks (1901) Chapter 1.
Lie down among the pines for a while, then get to plain pure white
love-work ... to help humanity and other mortals and the Lord.
- Letter from John Muir to Mrs. J.D. (Katharine) Hooker, 19 September 1911, from Para, Brazil, as quoted in The Life and Letters of John Muir (1924) chapter 17, II
and in John Muir's Last Journey (2001) page 67.
I love [the] ocean as I do the mountains--indeed the mountains are an ocean with harder waves...
- John Muir,
- Letter to J.B. McChesney, December 10, 1872, in Life and
Letters of John Muir, Chapter 10.
God who is Light has led me tenderly from light to light to the shoreless ocean of rayless beamless Spirit Light that bathes these holy mountains.
- John Muir
- Letter to Mrs. Kate N. Daggett, December 30, 1872, in Life and
Letters of John Muir, Chapter 10.
Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons
on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got
into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all
difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.
- John Muir,
- "The National Parks and Forest Reservations" in a speech by John Muir (Proceedings of the Meeting of the Sierra Club Held November 23, 1895.)
Published in Sierra Club Bulletin, (1896), v. 1, no. 7, January 1896, pp 271-284, at 282-83.
All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters but little where we go, to highlands or lowlands, woods or plains, on the sea or land or down among the crystals of waves or high in a balloon in the sky; through all the climates, hot or cold, storms and calms, everywhere and always we are in God's eternal beauty and love. So universally true is this, the spot where we chance to be always seems the best.
- John
of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) page 299.
[On a Sierra Club Outing, author Albert Palmer tells of a conversation he had with John Muir on the trail. He asked Muir, "someone told me you did not approve of the word 'hike.' Is that so?" His blue eyes flashed, and with his Scotch accent he replied]:
" I don't like either the word or the thing. People ought
to saunter in the mountains - not hike! Do you know the origin of that
word 'saunter?' It's a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people
used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages
through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, 'A
la sainte terre,' 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers
or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter
through them reverently, not 'hike' through them."
- John Muir, as quoted by Albert W. Palmer, The Mountain Trail and its Message (1911) pages 27-28 - excerpted in A
Parable of Sauntering .
I have this one big, well-defined faith for humanity as a workman, that the time is coming when every "article of manufacture" will be as purely a work of God as are these mountains and pine trees and bonnie loving flowers.
- Letter to Mrs. Kate N. Daggett, December 30,1872, in Life and
Letters of John Muir, Chapter 10.
With inexpressible delight you wade out into the grassy sun-lake, feeling
yourself contained on one of Nature's most sacred chambers, withdrawn
from the sterner influences of the mountains, secure from all intrusion,
secure from yourself, free in the universal beauty. And notwithstanding
the scene is so impressively spiritual, and you seem dissolved in it
yet everything about you is beating with warm, terrestrial human love,
delightfully substantial and familiar.
- John Muir, "
The Glacier Meadows" Scribner's Monthly, February, 1879, from Nature
Journal with John Muir edited by Bonnie Johanna Gisel (Poetic Matrix Press,
2006) and The Glacier Meadows,
Chapter 7, of The Mountains
of California (1894).
Going to the mountains is going home.
- Our National Parks, (1901), chapter 1, page 1.
The mountains are calling and I must go, and I will work on while I can, studying incessantly.
- Letter to sister Sarah Galloway, September 3,1873, in Life and
Letters of John Muir, Chapter 10 (1923).
[Note that this quote is often truncated, removing the last half, as if going on vacation to visit a mere playground. But reading the full quote, Muir actually insisted that going to the mountains was only a first step. As Michael Wurtz points out in "What Muir Really Meant by 'the Mountains Are Calling' in Adventure Journal, August 13, 2018, "the shortened quote doesn't fully capture John Muir or his desire to understand and protect California's Yosemite." The reason to go was to study nature, and just as important, work to protect our wilderness areas. Elsewhere in the letter, Muir revealed that he was spending "the season in prosecuting my researches," and hoped to make a scientific contribution from his mountain studies, in winter to "work with my pen." Wurtz points out, "These words reveal a man who saw responsibility and purpose as well as pleasure in the mountains." As writer Michael Seeger writes, "Perhaps we all would do well to work on studying nature while we can - and if we don't work to protect our lands, we may not have long to do so."] (If the Adventure Journal link no longer works, the article is available on the Internet Archive WayBack Machine. This essay by Michael Wurtz was first published as How John Muir's Incessant Study Saved Yosemite in The Conversation in 2016.
Quotations from John Muir were selected by Harold Wood from various sources.
Many thanks to Dan Styer for finding and identifying the sources for many of these quotes. See his story about how he helped improve this website, as well as the WikiQuotes page of John Muir quotes, on his web page about the Quotable John Muir. On that page he also provides further background on the source of the "Between every two pine trees..." quote.
A note on sources:
Different versions of Muir's best quotes can be found
in several of his articles, letters, and journal reprints, as well as his books. Generally speaking, books and articles published prior to 1923 are in the public domain; however, note that some of Muir's most-quoted
passages come from the book John
of the Mountains - The Unpublished Journals of John Muir , first published in 1938, copyright renewed 1966 by John Muir Hanna and Ralph Eugene Wolfe. Thus it will be at least 2019 before this work becomes public domain; accordingly the full text of this work is
not available on this website because the book is still under copyright protection. See generally Copyright Status of the Writings of John Muir.
If you know the source for a quote that does not have one identified, please let me know by e-mail to: harold.wood@sierraclub.org.
and see the WikiQuote website for John Muir Quotes. (off-site link)
CAUTION: There are several misquotes of John Muir widely circulated on the Internet, printed on souvenirs like mugs and signs, and even in published books. See our John Muir Misquoted page to make sure you don't use quotes incorrectly attributed to John Muir.
For a printed resource for finding Muir's quotes, see John
Muir in His Own Words: A Book of Quotations Compiled and edited
by Peter Browning (Lafayette, CA: Great West Books, 1988).
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