“The power of imagination makes us infinite.”
John Muir
Mountaineer
JOHN MUIR QUOTES
Quotes on the mountains of life:
Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.
How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!
The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing.
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.
The morning stars still sing together, and the world, not yet half made, becomes more beautiful every day.
Earth has no sorrow that earth can not heal.
I am learning to live close to the lives of my friends without ever seeing them. No miles of any measurement can separate your soul from mine.
“The sun shines not on us but in us.”
Quotes on nature and national parks:
In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.
None of Nature’s landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.
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.
There is a love of wild Nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love ever showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties.
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
Yosemite Park is a place of rest… 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.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
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.
There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.
Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever.
About
JOHN MUIR
John Muir was an author, environmental philosopher, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States of America. He is often called “Father of the National Parks” and “John of the Mountains.”
Muir published more than 12 books and 300 articles in his lifetime. His books, essays, and letters describing his adventures in nature, and especially in the Sierra Nevada, have attracted millions of readers. His activism helped in the preservation of the Yosemite Valley, Sequoia National Park and many other wilderness areas. Muir co-founded The Sierra Club, a prominent American conservation organization. The club has helped establish a number of national parks after he died.
Muir published two landmark articles on wilderness preservation as part of the campaign to make Yosemite a national park. The articles helped support the push for U.S. Congress to pass a bill in 1890 to establish Yosemite National Park.
Muir featured on two U.S. commemorative postage stamps, a 5-cent stamp issued on April 29, 1964, and 32-cent stamp issued on February 3, 1998. An image of Muir appears on the California state quarter released in 2005.