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
To lovers of the wild, these mountains are not a hundred miles away. Their spiritual power and the goodness of the sky make them near, as a circle of friends. ... You cannot feel yourself out of doors; plain, sky, and mountains ray beauty which you feel. You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp-fire. Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature.
I might have become a millionaire, but I chose to become a tramp.
There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation's braggart lords.
Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God's mountains.
None of Nature's landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.
Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing
Most people are on the world, not in it-- having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them-- undiffused seporate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but seporate.
Galen Clark was the best mountaineer I ever met, and one of the kindest and most amiable of all my mountain friends.
Going into the woods, is going home
Writing is like the life of a glacier; one eternal grind.
The power of imagination is infinite.
There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.
Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.
Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts . . .