John Muir Quotes About Life
-
A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves. No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.
→ -
One can make a day of any size and regulate the rising and setting of his own sun and the brightness of its shining.
→ -
Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.
→ -
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.
→ -
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed,-chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. During a man's life only saplings can be grown, in the place of the old trees-tens of centuries old-that have been destroyed.
→ -
We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not extensive ones, it is true; but our own little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings - many of them not so much.
→ -
The power of imagination makes us infinite.
→ -
This 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.
→ -
No right way is easy in this rough world. We must risk our lives to save them.
→ -
Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.
→ -
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
→ -
I never have held death in contempt, though in the course of my explorations I have oftentimes felt that to meet one's fate on a noble mountain, or in the heart of a glacier, would be blessed as compared with death from disease, or from some shabby lowland accident. But the best death, quick and crystal-pure, set so glaringly open before us, is hard enough to face, even though we feel gratefully sure that we have already had happiness enough for a dozen lives.
→ -
Surely all God's people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes- all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them.
→ -
Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.
→
Related Authors
-
John Burroughs Essayist -
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essayist -
Donald Worster Professor -
Ansel Adams Photographer -
Mary Hunter Austin Writer -
-
Edward Abbey Author -
George Bird Grinnell Anthropologist -
Theodore Roosevelt 26th U.S. President -
Rachel Carson Marine biologist -
-
David R. Brower Environmentalist -
John James Audubon Ornithologist -
Joseph LeConte Geologist -
Aldo Leopold Author -
Henry David Thoreau Author -
Gifford Pinchot Former Governor of Pennsylvania -
Gaylord Nelson Former United States Senator -
Upton Sinclair Author -
Alexander von Humboldt Naturalist