John Muir: Trending quotes (page 5)

“"The water in music the oar forsakes." The air in music the wing forsakes. All things move in music and write it. The mouse, lizard, and grasshopper sing together on the Turlock sands, sing with the morning stars.”

John Muir

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, from Yosemite Valley (September 1874); published in William Federic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 11: On Widening Currents 
(Presumably paraphrasing from the poem Woodnotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Come learn with me the fatal song / Which knits the world in music strong / … / and the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake / The wood is wiser far than thou".)
(Turlock: Town where Muir changed from railroad to foot travel in this particular journey from Oakland, California, to Yosemite Valley.)
1870s

Music , Star , Water , Singing

“Man as he came from the hand of his Maker was poetic in both mind and body, but the gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed Nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.”

John Muir

letter to J.B. McChesney http://digitalcollections.pacific.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/muirletters/id/12909/rec/84 (19 September 1871)
1870s

Nature

“I would advise sitting from morning till night under some willow bush on the river bank where there is a wide view. This will be "doing the valley" far more effectively than riding along trails in constant motion from point to point. The entire valley is made up of "points of interest."”

John Muir

"The Summer Flood of Tourists", San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin (part 1 of the 11 part series "Summering in the Sierra") dated 14 June 1875, published 22 June 1875; reprinted in John Muir: Summering in the Sierra, edited by Robert Engberg (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) page 71
Advice for visitors to Yosemite given by John Muir at age 37 years. Compare advice given by the 74-year-old Muir below.
1870s

Night

“Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common every-day beauty.”

John Muir

Source: 1890s, The Mountains of California (1894), chapter 15: In the Sierra Foot-Hills

Beauty , Way , Mountain , Learning

“Cloudy all day. Showery on mtns. to eastward at noon. Fine thunderstorm evening, with grand display of zigzag intensely vivid & very near with keen cracks [and] grand trailing rain … Visited Elk ranch. About sixty old & young. Old bulls carry horns in noble style & grand airs.”

John Muir

journal entry, Island Park, Idaho (26 August 1913) — the last field entry http://digitalcollections.pacific.edu/cdm/ref/collection/muirjournals/id/3843/show/3839 in Muir's last field journal
1910s

“Men use care in purchasing a horse, and are neglectful in choosing friends.”

John Muir

Attributed to John Mair, not John Muir, in Toasts and Tributes, edited by Arthur Gray (Rohde and Haskins, New York, 1904) page 154.
Misattributed

Men , Horse

“Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds, or the written music of water written in river-lines?”

John Muir

August 1875, page 220
John of the Mountains, 1938

Music , Water

“One shining morning, at the head of the Pacheco Pass, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most divinely beautiful and sublime I have ever beheld. There at my feet lay the great central plain of California, level as a lake thirty or forty miles wide, four hundred long, one rich furred bed of golden Compositae. And along the eastern shore of this lake of gold rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, in massive, tranquil grandeur, so gloriously colored and so radiant that it seemed not clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city. Along the top, and extending a good way down, was a rich pearl-gray belt of snow; then a belt of blue and dark purple, marking the extension of the forests; and stretching along the base of the range a broad belt of rose-purple, where lay the miners' gold and the open foothill gardens — all the colors smoothly blending, making a wall of light clear as crystal and ineffably fine, yet firm as adamant. Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years in the midst of it, rejoicing and wondering, seeing the glorious floods of light that fill it, — the sunbursts of morning among the mountain-peaks, the broad noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the thousand dashing waterfalls with their marvelous abundance of irised spray, — it still seems to me a range of light.”

John Muir

" The Treasures of the Yosemite http://books.google.com/books?id=ZzWgAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA483", The Century Magazine, volume XL, number 4 (August 1890) pages 483-500 (at page 483)
1890s

Beauty , Color , Way , Mountain

“When I reached the [Yosemite] valley, all the rocks seemed talkative, and more lovable than ever. They are dear friends, and have warm blood gushing through their granite flesh; and I love them with a love intensified by long and close companionship. … I … bathed in the bright river, sauntered over the meadows, conversed with the domes, and played with the pines.”

John Muir

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr (December 1872); published as " A Geologist's Winter Walk http://books.google.com/books?id=OAEbAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA355", Overland Monthly, volume 10, number 4 (April 1873) pages 355-358 (at page 355); modified slightly and reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 2
1870s

Love

“Surely all God's people, however serious and savage, great or small, like to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes, — all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them.”

John Muir

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_story_of_my_boyhood_and_youth/ (1913), chapter 5: Young Hunters
1910s

God , People , Dance

“When night was drawing near, I ran down the flowery slopes exhilarated, thanking God for the gift of this great day. The setting sun fired the clouds. All the world seemed new-born. Every thing, even the commonest, was seen in new light and was looked at with new interest as if never seen before.”

John Muir

Travels in Alaska http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/travels_in_alaska/ (1915), chapter 7: Glenora Peak
1910s

God , World , Light , Sun

“There is no estimating the wit and wisdom concealed and latent in our lower fellow mortals until made manifest by profound experiences; for it is through suffering that dogs as well as saints are developed and made perfect.”

John Muir

Terry Gifford, LLO, page 685
For more excerpts from Muir's account of the dog Stickeen in Alaska, see Stickeen.
1900s, Stickeen (1909)

Wisdom , Dogs , Suffering , Perfection

“I've had a great time in South America and South Africa. Indeed it now seems that on this pair of wild hot continents I've enjoyed the most fruitful year of my life.”

John Muir

letter to William Colby (4 February 1912); published in " John Muir — President of the Sierra Club http://archive.org/stream/sierraclubbullet1019sier#page/n17/mode/2up", by William E. Colby, Sierra Club Bulletin, volume 10, number 1 (John Muir Memorial Issue, January 1916) pages 2-7 (at page 6); and in John Muir's Last Journey, edited by Michael P. Branch (Island Press, 2001), page 160
1910s

Life , Time

“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.”

John Muir

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr http://digitalcollections.pacific.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/muirletters/id/12500/rec/1 (perhaps Autumn 1870); published in William Federic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 8: Yosemite, Emerson, and the Sequoias
1870s

Autumn , Heart

“Little, however, is to be learned in confused, hurried tourist trips, spending only a poor noisy hour in a branded grove with a guide. You should go looking and listening alone on long walks through the wild forests and groves in all the seasons of the year. In the spring the winds are balmy and sweet…. In summer the days go by in almost constant brightness…. In the autumn the sighing of the winds is softer than ever…. Winter comes suddenly, arrayed in storms.”

John Muir

Source: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 9: The Sequoia and General Grant National Parks

Spring , Autumn , Learning , Winter

“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.”

John Muir

Source: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 1: The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West

People , Business , Heart , Animals

“Let our law-givers then make haste before it is too late to set apart this surpassingly glorious region for the recreation and well-being of humanity, and all the world will rise up and call them blessed.”

John Muir

" A Rival of the Yosemite: The Cañon of the South Fork of King's River, California http://books.google.com/books?id=fWoiAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA77" The Century Magazine, volume XLIII, number 1 (November 1891) pages 77-97 (at page 97)
1890s

World , Law

“The United States government has always been proud of the welcome it has extended to good men of every nation, seeking freedom and homes and bread.”

John Muir

Source: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 10: The American Forests

Men , Home , Freedom

“Nature chose for a tool, not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries, the offspring of the sun and sea.”

John Muir

Source: 1890s, The Mountains of California (1894), chapter 1: The Sierra Nevada

Flowers , Nature , Sun , Sea

“Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions.”

John Muir

August 1875, page 220
John of the Mountains, 1938

Nature , Affliction