“The moon is looking down into the canyon, and how marvelously the great rocks kindle to her light! Every dome, and brow, and swelling boss touched by her white rays, glows as if lighted with snow.”
Source: STEEP TRAILS: California - Utah - Nevada - Washington - Oregon - The Grand Canyon: Adventure Memoirs, Travel Sketches, Nature Essays and Wilderness Studies from the author of The Yosemite, Our National Parks, A Thousand-mile Walk to the Gulf & Picturesque California
“Listen to them! How wholly infused with God is this one big word of love that we call the world!”
Source: John Muir: Nature Writings
“Quench love, and what is left of a man's life but the folding of a few jointed bones and square inches of flesh? Who would call that life?”
Source: John Muir, in His Own Words: A Book of Quotations
“Nothing can be done well at a speed of forty miles a day. The multitude of mixed, novel impressions rapidly piled on one another make only a dreamy, bewildering, swirling blur, most of which is unrememberable.”
Source: JOHN MUIR Ultimate Collection: Travel Memoirs, Wilderness Essays, Environmental Studies & Letters (Illustrated): Picturesque California, The Treasures of the Yosemite, Our National Parks, Steep Trails, Travels in Alaska, A Thousand-mile Walk to the Gulf, Save the Redwoods, The Cruise of the Corwin and more
“Nature has always something rare to show us... and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof.”
Source: Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, My First Summer in the Sierra, the Mountains of California, Stickeen, Selected Essays
“So extraordinary 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.”
“Surely all God's people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play.”
“Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds or the music of water written in river-lines?”
“See how God writes history. No technical knowledge is required; only a calm day and a calm mind.”
Source: THE YOSEMITE COLLECTION of John Muir (Illustrated): The Yosemite, Our National Parks, Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park, A Rival of the Yosemite, The Treasures of the Yosemite, Yosemite Glaciers, Yosemite in Winter & Yosemite in Spring
“How infinitely superior to our physical senses are those of the mind!”
Source: John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir