“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. -John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)”

— John Muir

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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John Muir 183

Scottish-born American naturalist and author 1838–1914

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“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

John Muir book My First Summer in the Sierra

Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 248
First line of the documentary film " John Muir in the New World http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/john-muir-in-the-new-world/watch-the-full-documentary-film/1823/" (American Masters), produced, directed, and written by Catherine Tatge.
Source: 1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

“John Muir, Earth — planet, Universe niel and I”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Muir's home address, as inscribed on the inside front cover of his first field journal http://digitalcollections.pacific.edu/cdm/ref/collection/muirjournals/id/115/show/3, which started 1 July 1867
1860s

“The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought... Nothing is what we thought.”

Pema Chödron (1936) American philosopher

When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (1997)

“For a consistent naturalist science can only be a refinement of animal exploration, a practice humans have devised for finding their way in the bit of the universe in which they have so far survived. Instead of thinking of science as a law-seeking activity, we can think of it as a tool humans use to cope with a world they will never understand.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Sweet Morality (p. 224)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

“Our way through life should not be difficult — but it is. The fact is that our lives are filled mostly with picking and choosing. "I want this, but not that." And because things are not anything other than the way they really are, we suffer. Nowhere is this more apparent and painful than when we are trying to find life after death. We so desperately want things to be the way they were. But they are not. So the longing itself becomes an additional source of suffering.”

Richard Carlson (1961–2006) Author, psychotherapist and motivational speaker

Finding Life after Death
What About the Big Stuff (2002)

“The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant.”

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 12, section 4 (p. 179)

“And therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn’t pre-decide what it is we are trying to do except to find out more about it”

Richard Feynman book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Source: No Ordinary Genius (1994), p. 251-252, from interview in "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" (1981): video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEwUwWh5Xs4&t=45m21s
(Also in book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999) p. 23.)
Context: People say to me, "Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?" No, I'm not. I'm just looking to find out more about the world and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it; that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is!… And therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn’t pre-decide what it is we are trying to do except to find out more about it… My interest in science is to simply find out more about the world.

“Do not let us underrate the danger. It threatens everything we care for. For if it does succeed, it will not only bring us back to 1914 — in itself bad enough — but to something far worse even than that.”

Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (1864–1958) lawyer, politician and diplomat in the United Kingdom

The Future of Civilization (1938)
Context: Do not let us underrate the danger. It threatens everything we care for. For if it does succeed, it will not only bring us back to 1914 — in itself bad enough — but to something far worse even than that. For instance, it is now apparently part of the normal doctrine of those who advocate this system that no distinction can be made between combatants and non-combatants, and that a perfectly legitimate and indeed necessary method of warfare will be the wholesale destruction of unfortified cities and their inhabitants. No doubt there will be countervailing efforts to prevent such things happening; but there is, at any rate, one section of military thought which believes that the only way to stop the bombardment of the cities belonging to one belligerent will be the bombardment of the cities belonging to the other.

“Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.”

Margaret Atwood book Dancing Girls

Source: Dancing Girls

“If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”

Kristin Hannah book The Nightingale

Source: The Nightingale

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. -John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)”

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John Muir 183

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