518 Quotes by John Muir

You'll never make up what you lost today, I've been wandering through a thousand rooms of God's crystal temple. I've been a thousand feet down in the crevasses, with matchless domes and sculpted figures and carved ice-work all about me. Solomon's marble and ivory palaces were nothing to it. Such purity, such color, such delicate beauty! I was tempted to stay there and feed my soul, and softly freeze, until I would become part of the glacier. What a great death that would be.

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.

Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.

Even the sick should try these so-called dangerous passes, because for every unfortunate they kill, they cure a thousand.

Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

The mountains are calling and I must go.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity