John Muir citations (185 citations, Page 6)

“Society speaks and all men listen, mountains speak and wise men listen.”

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John Muir

Frequently attributed to Muir without source. An extensive search of Muir's published and unpublished writings found several sharp and cogent observations concerning society (see above) but not this one.
Misattributed

“How terribly downright must seem the utterances of storms and earthquakes to those accustomed to the soft hypocrisies of society.”

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John Muir

" Flood-Storm in the Sierra http://books.google.com/books?id=Iy0GAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA489", Overland Monthly, volume 14, number 6 (June 1875) pages 489-496 (at page 494)
1870s

“If my soul could get away from this so-called prison, be granted all the list of attributes generally bestowed on spirits, my first ramble on spirit wings would not be among the volcanoes of the moon. Nor should I follow the sunbeams to their sources in the sun. I should hover about the beauty of our own good star. I should not go moping among the tombs, nor around the artificial desolation of men. I should study Nature's laws in all their crossings and unions; I should follow magnetic streams to their source and follow the shores of our magnetic oceans. I should go among the rays of the aurora, and follow them to their beginnings, and study their dealings and communions with other powers and expressions of matter. And I should go to the very center of our globe and read the whole splendid page from the beginning. But my first journeys would be into the inner substance of flowers, and among the folds and mazes of Yosemite's falls. How grand to move about in the very tissue of falling columns, and in the very birthplace of their heavenly harmonies, looking outward as from windows of ever-varying transparency and staining!”

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John Muir

18 January 1870, pages 43-44
John of the Mountains, 1938

“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.”

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John Muir

July 1890, pages 315-316
John of the Mountains, 1938

“So extravagant is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert. And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees,….”

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John Muir livre My First Summer in the Sierra

Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 224
1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

“Man has injured every animal he has touched.”

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John Muir

11 February 1869, page 23
John of the Mountains, 1938

“April 21. My birthday — I am told the fifty-seventh, and yet I feel only a boy. Must make haste and get my work done ere the night falls. Made an excursion with the babes to Mount Wanda.”

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John Muir

21 April 1895, page 340
John of the Mountains, 1938

“Our crude civilization engenders a multitude of wants, and lawgivers are ever at their wits' end devising. The hall and the theater and the church have been invented, and compulsory education. Why not add compulsory recreation? Our forefathers forged chains of duty and habit, which bind us notwithstanding our boasted freedom, and we ourselves in desperation add link to link, groaning and making medicinal laws for relief. Yet few think of pure rest or of the healing power of Nature.”

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John Muir

12 November 1875, page 234
John of the Mountains, 1938

“The very thought of this Alaska garden is a joyful exhilaration. … Out of all the cold darkness and glacial crushing and grinding comes this warm, abounding beauty and life to teach us that what we in our faithless ignorance and fear call destruction is creation finer and finer.”

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John Muir

Travels in Alaska http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/travels_in_alaska/ (1915), chapter 16: Glacier Bay
1910s

“God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.”

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John Muir

pages 16-21 (at page 16)
1890s, The National Parks and Forest Reservations, 1895

“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.”

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John Muir

letter to Mrs. J.D. Hooker http://www.westadamsheritage.org/katharine-putnam-hooker (19 September 1911); published in The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 17, II; and in John Muir's Last Journey, edited by Michael P. Branch (Island Press, 2001), page 67
1910s

“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.”

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John Muir

1895, pages 350-351
John of the Mountains, 1938

“Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal, or heaven cannot heal, for the earth as seen in the clean wilds of the mountains is about as divine as anything the heart of man can conceive!”

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John Muir

1872(?), page 99
Echoing the 1816 hymn Come Ye Disconsolate http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/c/y/d/cydiscon.htm by Thomas Moore: "Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal."
John of the Mountains, 1938

“Looking eastward from the summit of Pacheco Pass one shining morning, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld. At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, one rich furred garden of yellow Compositae. And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city…. Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light.”

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John Muir

The Yosemite http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_yosemite/ (1912), chapter 1: The Approach to the Valley
1910s

“Sit down in climbing, and hear the pines sing.”

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John Muir

page 428
John of the Mountains, 1938

“The snow is melting into music.”

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John Muir

15 January 1873, page 107
John of the Mountains, 1938

“I always befriended animals and have said many a good word for them. Even to the least-loved mosquitoes I gave many a meal, and told them to go in peace.”

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John Muir

page 277
John of the Mountains, 1938

“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”

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John Muir

page 438
Last lines of the documentary film series " The National Parks: America's Best Idea http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/" by Ken Burns.
John of the Mountains, 1938

“Brought into right relationship with the wilderness … he would see that his appropriation of earth's resources beyond his personal needs would only bring imbalance and beget ultimate loss and poverty for all.”

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John Muir

This statement is not by Muir, but by his biographer Linnie Marsh Wolfe, in Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (1945) page 188.
Misattributed

“The whole wilderness seems to be alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly.”

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John Muir livre My First Summer in the Sierra

Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 277
1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

“I drifted about from rock to rock, from stream to stream, from grove to grove. Where night found me, there I camped. When I discovered a new plant, I sat down beside it for a minute or a day, to make its acquaintance and hear what it had to tell. … I asked the boulders I met, whence they came and whither they were going.”

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John Muir

" Explorations in the Great Tuolumne Cañon http://books.google.com/books?id=ZikGAQAAIAAJ&pg=P139", Overland Monthly, volume XI, number 2 (August 1873) pages 139-147 (at page 141); modified slightly and reprinted in John of the Mountains (1938), page 69
1870s

“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.”

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John Muir

Source: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 3: The Yosemite National Park

“It is generally supposed that complete pleasure of this kind, permeating one's very flesh and bones, unfits the student for scientific pursuits in which cool judgment and observation are required. But the effect is just the opposite. Instead of producing a dissipated condition, the mind is fertilized and stimulated and developed like sun-fed plants.”

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John Muir

Source: 1890s, The Mountains of California (1894), chapter 7: The Glacier Meadows

“Those [forest] reserves are not merely for the convenience and benefit of the people near them, but they are the property of the nation and for its greatest good. It is unreasonable to suppose that they should be destroyed or imperiled for any local convenience, as a mere present to men engaged in one local industry.”

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John Muir

statement by Muir quoted in news report "Started for Alaska: Harriman Exploring Expedition in Portland" in the Portland Morning Oregonian, 31 May 1899, page 12, columns 1-5 (at column 4)
1890s

“[I first climbed Half Dome on] one of those brooding days that come just between Indian summer and winter, when the clouds are like living creatures.”

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John Muir

"South Dome", San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin (part 11 of the 11 part series "Summering in the Sierra") dated 10 November 1875, published 18 November 1875; reprinted in John Muir: Summering in the Sierra, edited by Robert Engberg (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) page 147
1870s

“To few men was it given to realize so completely the element of eternity — of time-effacing enjoyment in work — as it was to John Muir. The secret of it all was in his soul, the soul of a child, of a poet, and of a strong man, all blended into one. … An innate nobility of character, an unstudied reverence for all that is sublime in nature or in life, unconsciously called forth the best in his friends and acquaintances. In the spiritual as in the physical realm flowers blossomed in his footsteps where he went. After all it is to such men as John Muir that we must look for the sustenance of those finer feelings that keep men in touch with the spiritual meaning and beauty of the universe, and make them capable of understanding those rare souls whose insight has invested life with imperishable hope and charm. … To all who knew John Muir intimately his gentleness and humaneness toward all creatures that shared the world with him, was one of the finest attributes of his character. … Among those who have won title to remembrance as prophets and interpreters of nature he rises to a moral as well as poetical altitude that will command the admiring attention of men so long as human records shall endure.”

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John Muir

William Frederic Badé (pages 38-40)
Sierra Club Bulletin - Memorial Issue

“Never have I met another man of such singleness of mind in his devotion to nature as Muir. He lived and moved and had his being as a devotee. … Of himself he took little heed, but no zealous missionary ever went abroad to spread the gospel with his fervor in communicating a love of nature. And with him a love of nature meant an understanding of her laws. He sauntered over the mountains, claiming kinship with the rocks and growing things and gathering them all to his heart. He has told me that he found it necessary, in getting people to listen, to tell them stories such as his immortal tale of Stickeen, but the real hope in his heart was to awaken their interest so they would want to go to nature themselves and to delve into the mysteries of her ways. … Every tree and flower, every bird and stone was to him the outward token of an invisible world in process of making.”

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John Muir

Charles Keeler (pages 17-18)
Sierra Club Bulletin - Memorial Issue

“It is not easy to write of my good friend, John Muir. The impression of his personality was so strong on those who knew him that all words seem cheap beside it. Those who never knew him can never, through any word of ours, be brought to realize what they have missed. … He had a quaint, crisp way of talking, his literary style in fact, and none of the nature lovers, the men who know how to feel in the presence of great things and beautiful, have expressed their craft better than he.”

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John Muir

David Starr Jordan, first President of Stanford University (page 8)
Sierra Club Bulletin - Memorial Issue

“John Muir has been a role model to generations of Californians and to conservationists around the world. He taught us to be active and to enjoy — but at the same time protect — our parks, our beaches, and our mountains.”

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John Muir

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, announcing http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/tributes.aspx the selection of the "John Muir-Yosemite Design" for the California State Quarter (29 March 2004)

“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.”

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John Muir livre A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf

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.
Source: A Thousand-Mile Walk To the Gulf, 1916, chapter 6: Cedar Keys, pages 160-161

John Muir citations
Page 6

John Muir Citations

John Muir: Citations en anglais

John Muir citations Page 6

John Muir Citations

John Muir: Citations en anglais

John Muir citations
Page 6