Need some inspiration from nature? Scottish-born American Naturalist John Muir, also known as the father of national parks, has some amazing quotes that can bring you the wholesome feeling of being in nature.
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John Muir Quotes about Nature
1. ”In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.”
2. “The snow is melting into music.”
3. “No words will ever describe the exquisite beauty and charm of this mountain park – Nature’s landscape garden at once tenderly beautiful and sublime. “
4. “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.”
5. “The sun shines not on us but in us.”
6. “Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”
7. Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue. John Muir Click To Tweet
8. “Into the forest I go to lose my mind and find my soul.”
9. “Like a generous host, [Nature] offers her brimming cups in endless variety, served in a grand hall, the sky its ceiling, the mountains its walls, decorated with glorious paintings and enlivened with bands of music ever playing.”
10. “This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising.”
11. Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt. John Muir Click To Tweet
12. “Earth has no sorrow that earth cannot heal.”
13. “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
14. “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.”
15. “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.”
16. “It seems strange that bears, so fond of all sorts of flesh, running the risks of guns and fires and poison, should never attack men except in defense of their young. How easily and safely a bear could pick us up as we lie asleep! Only wolves and tigers seem to have learned to hunt man for food, and perhaps sharks and crocodiles.”
17. “Sheep, like people, are ungovernable when hungry.”
John Muir Quotes about Mountains
18. “Going to the mountains is going home.”
19. “I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news”
20. “One day’s exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books.”
21. “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.”
22. “How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! To behold this alone is worth the pains of any excursion a thousand times over. The highest peaks burned like islands in a sea of liquid shade. Then the lower peaks and spires caught the glow, and long lances of light, streaming through many a notch and pass, fell thick on the frozen meadows.”
23. “The mountains are fountains not only of rivers and fertile soil, but of men.”
24. The mountains are calling and I must go. John Muir Click To Tweet
25. “Society speaks and all men listen, mountains speak and wise men listen.”
26. “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.”
27. “Who reports the works and ways of the clouds, those wondrous creations coming into being every day like freshly upheaved mountains?”
28. “But no temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life…as if into this one mountain mansion Nature had gathered her choicest treasures.”
29. Wherever we go in the mountains, we find more than we seek. John Muir Click To Tweet
30. “In every country the mountains are fountains, not only of rivers but of men. Therefore we all are born mountaineers, the offspring of rock and sunshine.”
John Muir Quotes about Hiking
31. “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 away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”
32. “Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer.”
33. “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.”
34. “Hiking. I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains…these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.”
35. “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.”
36. “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 Muir Quotes about Trees and Forest
37. ”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.”
38. “Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Here grow the wallflower and the violet. The squirrel will come and sit upon your knee, the logcock will wake you in the morning. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill. Of all the upness accessible to mortals, there is no upness comparable to the mountains.”
39. “Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.”
40. “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.”
41. “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
John Muir Quotes about Destruction and Conservation
42. The battle for conservation will go on endlessly. It is part of the universal battle between right and wrong. John Muir Click To Tweet
43. “The practical importance of the preservation of our forests is augmented by their relations to climate, soil and streams.”
44. “The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.”
45. “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 out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones.”
46. “Every other civilized nation in the world has been compelled to care for its forests, and so must we if waste and destruction are not to go on to the bitter end, leaving America as barren as Palestine or Spain.”
John Muir Quotes about God
47.“I’d rather be in the mountains thinking of God, than in church thinking about the mountains.”
48. “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.”
49. “God never made an ugly landscape. All that sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.”
50. “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!”
51. “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.”
52. “Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.”
53. “I bade adieu to mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God.”
John Muir Quotes about Death
54. “Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.”
55. “I never have held death in contempt, though in the course of my explorations I have oftentimes felt that to meet one’s fate on a noble mountain, or in the heart of a glacier, would be blessed as compared with death from disease, or from some shabby lowland accident. But the best death, quick and crystal-pure, set so glaringly open before us, is hard enough to face, even though we feel gratefully sure that we have already had happiness enough for a dozen lives.”
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More about John Muir’s life and work:
