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John Muir cytaty
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John Muir – szkocko-amerykański przyrodnik, pisarz, filozof środowiska, jeden z pierwszych rzeczników ochrony dzikiej przyrody w Stanach Zjednoczonych.

Jego listy, eseje i książki opowiadające o jego przygodach w dzikich ostępach, zwłaszcza w górach Sierra Nevada w Kalifornii cieszyły się bardzo dużą popularnością i były czytane przez miliony ludzi. Jego aktywne zaangażowanie na rzecz ochrony środowiska naturalnego przyczyniło się do zachowania Yosemite Valley, Parku Narodowego Sekwoi i innych obszarów dzikiej przyrody. Założył Sierra Club – jedno z najważniejszych stowarzyszeń zaangażowanych w ochronę środowiska naturalnego w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Na jego cześć został nazwany liczący 340 km szlak turystyczny w górach Sierra Nevada . Inne miejsca nazwane na jego cześć to m.in.: Muir Woods National Monument, Muir Beach, John Muir College, Mount Muir, Camp Muir oraz lodowiec Muira. W Szkocji jego imieniem nazwano liczący 209 km szlak .

W swoim późniejszym życiu Muir większość czasu poświęcał ochronie zachodnich lasów Ameryki Północnej. Dzięki niemu do Kongresu Stanów Zjednoczonych trafił projekt przyjętej w 1890 roku ustawy tworzącej Park Narodowy Yosemite. Wyrażana w jego dziełach duchowa jakość i entuzjazm wobec natury zainspirowały czytelników, w tym kongresmenów i prezydentów, do podjęcia działań na rzecz ochrony dużych obszarów dzikiej przyrody. Życie Muira, dziś nazywanego „Ojcem Parków Narodowych” , zostało uwiecznione m.in. przez National Park Service w krótkim filmie dokumentalnym.

John Muir jest uznawany za „inspirację dla Szkotów i Amerykanów”. Jego biograf, Steven J. Holmes, uważa że Muir stał się „jednym z patronów działalności środowiskowej dwudziestowiecznej Ameryki”, zarówno politycznej jak i rekreacyjnej. Jego dzieła są często przytaczane i omawiane w książkach i czasopismach, jest również często cytowany przez fotografów przyrody, m.in. przez Ansela Adamsa. „Muir gruntownie ukształtował same kategorie, przez które Amerykanie rozumieją i wyobrażają sobie ich relację ze światem przyrody”, pisze Holmes. Muir był ekologicznym myślicielem, politycznym rzecznikiem i religijnym prorokiem, którego dzieła stały się osobistym przewodnikiem ku naturze dla wielu osób, co uczyniło go „prawie wszechobecnym” we współczesnej świadomości środowiskowej. Według autora Williama Andersona, Muir egzemplifikował „archetyp naszej jedności z ziemią”, natomiast biograf Donald Worster uważa, że misją Muira było „uratowanie amerykańskiej duszy od całkowitego poddania się materializmowi”. 21 kwietnia 2013 roku w Szkocji, w 175. rocznicę urodzin Johna Muira, po raz pierwszy obchodzono John Muir Day, oddając hołd przyrodnikowi. Wikipedia  

✵ 21. Kwiecień 1838 – 24. Grudzień 1914
John Muir Fotografia
John Muir: 183   Cytaty 0   Polubień

John Muir: Cytaty po angielsku

“Wander a whole summer if you can… time will not be taken from the sum of your life. Instead of shortening, it will definitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal.”

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John Muir

Źródło: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 1: The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West <!-- Terry Gifford, EWDB, pages 465-466 -->
Kontekst: Wander here a whole summer, if you can. Thousands of God's wild blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted. If you are business-tangled, and so burdened by duty that only weeks can be got out of the heavy-laden year … give a month at least to this precious reserve. The time will not be taken from the sum of your life. Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal. Nevermore will time seem short or long, and cares will never again fall heavily on you, but gently and kindly as gifts from heaven.

“That memorable day died in purple and gold, and just as the last traces of the sunset faded in the west and the star-lilies filled the sky, the full moon looked down over the rim of the valley, and the great rocks, catching the silvery glow, came forth out of the dusky shadows like very spirits.”

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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 86)
1890s

“I did find Calypso hotdog — but only once, far in the depths of the very wildest of Canadian dark woods, near those high, cold, moss-covered swamps. … I felt as if I were in the presence of superior beings who loved me and beckoned me to come. I sat down beside them and wept for joy.”

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John Muir

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr (1866); published as "The Calypso Borealis, Botanical Enthusiasm" in Boston Recorder, 21 December 1866; republished in Bonnie Johanna Gisel, Kindred & Related Spirits: The Letters of John Muir and Jeanne C. Carr (2001), page 41
Muir's first published writing, concerning the orchid Calypso http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=CABU.
1860s

“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.”

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John Muir

statement by Muir as remembered by Samuel Hall Young in Alaska Days with John Muir (1915), chapter 7
1910s

“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.”

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John Muir

pages 271-284 (at pages 282-283)
1890s, The National Parks and Forest Reservations, 1895

“[Concerning an aurora, "vivid crimson … indescribably rich and deep":] The white, rayless light of morning, seen when I was alone amid the peaks of the California Sierra, had always seemed to me the most telling of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. But here the mountains themselves were made divine, and declared His glory in terms still more impressive.”

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John Muir

Travels in Alaska http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/travels_in_alaska/ (1915), chapter 9: The Discovery of Glacier Bay
1910s

“The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted.”

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John Muir

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

“Take a course of good water and air, and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.”

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John Muir

"Mount Shasta" in Picturesque California (1888-1890) page 165; reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 5
1880s

“Of all the fire-mountains which, like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest.”

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John Muir

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

“Pollution, defilement, squalor are words that never would have been created had man lived conformably to Nature. Birds, insects, bears die as cleanly and are disposed of as beautifully as flies. The woods are full of dead and dying trees, yet needed for their beauty to complete the beauty of the living…. How beautiful is all Death!”

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John Muir

August or September 1875, page 222
John of the Mountains, 1938

“[Concerning the founding of the Sierra Club] Hoping that we will be able to do something for wildness and make the mountains glad.”

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John Muir

letter to Henry Senger http://digitalcollections.pacific.edu/cdm/ref/collection/muirletters/id/14187/show/14186 (22 May 1892)
1890s

“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.”

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John Muir

"From Fort Independence to Yosemite", San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin (part 6 of the 11 part series "Summering in the Sierra") dated September 1875, published 15 September 1875; reprinted in John Muir: Summering in the Sierra, edited by Robert Engberg (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) page 113
1870s

“The whole wilderness in unity and interrelation is alive and familiar … the very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly. … No particle is ever wasted or worn out but eternally flowing from use to use.”

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John Muir

attributed to a Muir "manuscript" in Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (1945), page 124
Similar to statements from My First Summer in the Sierra http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/my_first_summer_in_the_sierra/, see quotes from 30 August and 2 September above.
1870s

“My fire was in all its glory about midnight, and, having made a bark shed to shelter me from the rain and partially dry my clothing, I had nothing to do but look and listen and join the trees in their hymns and prayers.”

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John Muir

Travels in Alaska http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/travels_in_alaska/ (1915), chapter 2: Alexander Archipelago and the Home I Found in Alaska
1910s

“To the sane and free it will hardly seem necessary to cross the continent in search of wild beauty, however easy the way, for they find it in abundance wherever they chance to be.”

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John Muir

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

“[Concerning the Sugar Pine] The wood is deliciously fragrant, and fine in grain and texture; it is of a rich cream-yellow, as if formed of condensed sunbeams.”

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John Muir

Źródło: 1890s, The Mountains of California (1894), chapter 8: The Forests <!-- Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 360 -->

“I ran home [from Cloud's Rest to Yosemite Valley] in the moonlight, with long, firm strides; for the sun-love made me strong. Down through the junipers — down through the firs; now in jet-shadows, now in white light; over sandy moraines and bare, clanking rock; past the huge ghost of South Dome, rising weird through the firs — past glorious Nevada — past the groves of Illilouette — through the pines of the valley; frost-crystals flashing all the sky beneath, as star-crystals on all the sky above. All of this mountain-bread for one day!”

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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 358); modified slightly and reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 2
1870s

“By forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs — now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life.”

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John Muir

"Mount Shasta" in Picturesque California (1888-1890) page 148; reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 3
1880s

“I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer.”

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John Muir

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, from Yosemite Valley (7 October 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
1870s

“"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.”

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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 <!-- Terry Gifford, LLO, page 203 -->
(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

“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.”

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John Muir

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

“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."”

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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

“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.”

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John Muir

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

“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.”

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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.”

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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

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

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John Muir

August 1875, page 220
John of the Mountains, 1938

“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.”

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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

“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.”

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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

“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.”

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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