John Muir
John Muir
John Muir also known as "John of the Mountains", was a Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States. His letters, essays, and books telling of his adventures in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada of California, have been read by millions. His activism helped to preserve the Yosemite Valley, Sequoia National Park and other wilderness areas. The Sierra Club, which he founded, is a prominent American conservation organization. The 211-mileJohn Muir...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEnvironmentalist
Date of Birth21 April 1838
CountryUnited States of America
In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.
Come to the woods, for here is rest.
God never made an ugly landscape. All that sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.
Wilderness is a necessity ... They will see what I meant in time. There must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls. Food and drink is not all. There is the spiritual. In some it is only a germ, of course, but the germ will grow.
Not blind opposition to progress,but opposition to blind progress...
Look! Nature is overflowing with the grandeur of God!
These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
I never saw a discontented tree.
I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.
The world, we are told, was made especially for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
To some, beauty seems but an accident of creation: to Muir it was the very smile of God.
The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.