John Muir

I aspire to live like John Muir. He really knew what true freedom is. I've read most of his works and attempted to copy some of his adventures (like his first ascent of the Mountaineer's Route on Mt. Whitney and his ascent of Mt. Ritter minus the near-death part). And he was fallible--it is interesting to read some of his stuff on Central Valley irrigated agriculture; and his thoughts on preventing fire have turned out to be harmful in the long run. Following are some of my favorite John Muir quotes.

"I am losing the precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains and learn the news." --Muir, as quoted by Samuel Hall Young in Alaska Days with John Muir

"No two streams are alike. I fancy I could discriminate between Merced water and all others. Merced water is one thing, Tuolumne another, Kings River another, while town water, deadened and lost, is nothing--not water at all." --August, 1875

"The common purity of Nature is
something wonderful--how she does so vast a number of different things cleanly without waste or dirt. I have often wondered by what means bears, wild sheep, and other large animals were so hidden at death as seldom to be visible. One may walk these woods from year to year without even snuffing a single tainted smell. 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!"

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything in the universe."

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike."

"Air yourself on the ice-prairies, or on breezy mountain-tops."

"In God's wildness lies the hope of the world--the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and the wounds heal ere we are aware."

"Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods... Here grow the wallflower and the violet... The squirrel will come and sit upon your knee, the logcock will wake you in the morning... Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill... Of all the upness accessible to mortals, there is no upness comparable to the mountains."

"Our crude civilization engenders a multitude of wants, and lawgivers are ever at their wits' end devising. The hall and the theater and the church have been invented, and compulsory education. Why not add compulsory recreation? ... Our forefathers forged chains of duty and habit, which bind us notwithstanding our boasted freedom, and we ourselves in desperation add link to link, groaning and making medicinal laws for relief. Yet few think of pure rest or the healing power of Nature. How hard to pull or shake people out of town! Earthquakes cannot do it, nor even plagues. These only cause the civilized to pray and ring bells and cower in corners of bedrooms and churches."

"In all excursions, when danger is realized, thought is quickened, common care buried, and pictures of wild, immortal beauty are pressed into memory, to dwell forever.
In climbing where the danger is great, all attention has to be given the ground step by step, leaving nothing for beauty by the way. But this care, so keenly and narrowly concentrated, is not without advantages. One is thoroughly aroused. Compared with the alertness of the senses and corresponding precision and power of the muscles on such occasions, one may be said to sleep all the rest of the year. The mind and body remain awake for some time after the dangerous ground is passed, so that arriving on the summit with the grand outlook--all the world spread below--one is able to see it better, and brings to the feast a far keener vision, and reaps richer harvests that would have been possible ere the presence of danger summoned him to life. Danger increasing is met with increasing power, and when thus successfully met, produces an exalted exhilaration joined with an increase in power over every muscle far beyond the experience possible in flat lowlands, where hidden dangers destroy without calling forth any strength to resist or enjoy. But woe to the climber, however ambitious, who has had the misfortune to indulge in tobacco and beer. He is easily nerve-shaken and daunted, though not naturally wanting in courage, when confronted by frowning ice-cliffs and terrible precipices, with shifting, crumbling narrow seams."

"How gentle much of storms really is, though apt to go unnoticed! Storms are never counted among the resources of a country, yet how far they go towards making brave people. No rush, no corrupting sloth among people who are called to cope with storms with faces set, whether this ministry of beauty be seen or no.... The tender beauty, the delights delicious of storms!"

"...The wilderness, I believe, is dear to every man though some are afraid of it. People load themselves with unnecessary fears, as if there were nothing in the wilderness but snakes and bears who, like the Devil, are going restlessly about seeking whom they may devour. The few creatures there are really mind their own business, and rather shun humans as their greatest enemies. But men are like children afraid of their mother. Like the man who, going out on a misty morning, saw a monster who proved to be his own brother."

"The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains--mountain-dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops."

"I am often asked if I am not lonesome on my solitary excursions. It seems so self-evident that one cannot be lonesome where everything is wild and beautiful and busy and steeped with God that the question is hard to answer--seems silly.
Every particle of rock or water or air has God by its side leading it the way it should go. How else would it know where to go or what to do?"

"Most people are on the world, not in it--have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them--undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate."

"A balmy day. Sunshine and lark song in glorious measure. A petition is being circulated in favor of preservation of larks from the ruthless slaughter of gunners. Larks are as characteristic of California weather as sunbeams. As well shoot the sun out of the sky."

"Better far, and more reasonable, it would be to burn our pianos and violins for firewood, than to cook our divine midgets of song-larks for food." --'Save the Meadowlarks', San Francisco Call, March 24, 1895

"Fine groves of Kellogg oak. This, I think, is the most beautiful of all our oaks; the branches so clean and shapely and so intricately woven and interlaced and interarched, the foliage so bright and clean and green and handsomely lobed and pointed and held out horizontal, not drooping; even the slender twigs, so numerous and unsketchably mingled and crossed, never droop, but hold themselves out with leaves on top and bend only with weight. Lying beneath the trees in bright weather, one may realize the tender and intricate beauty of this tree...."

"After lunch Gilder and I take a stroll along the stream, full of trout; swift, curving, surging from side to side with many small rapids between banks where grow birch, alder, and huge willows in clumps. We walk through a fine meadow with a wonderful richness of grass that will produce more wool and mutton, milk and beef than almost any other equal area I know of; yet the country is full of abandoned farms.... The inhabitants are going to towns to work in factories and stores, seeking fortunes--they know not how. They look down on labor. Health, manhood are all given away for the sake of something beyond their reach, and which even if attained would be found far less desirable by any sane person than the home farm life they despise...." --near Tyringham, Massachusetts, October 29, 1898.

"Hunting. Making some bird or beast go lame the rest of its life is a sore thing on one's conscience, at least nothing to boast of, and it has no religion in it."

"This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls."

See also the Sierra Club's John Muir Exhibit.