John Muir

John Muir was an American environmentalist, naturalist, traveler, writer, and scientist. He is, however, probably best remembered as one of the greatest champions of the Yosemite area's natural wonders. He thought that nature was a primary source revealing the character of God.

Sourced

• We all flow from one fountain— Soul. All are expressions of one love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.
  • Letter to Miss Catharine Merrill, from New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite Valley (9 June 1872); Published in Badè's Life and Letters of John Muir

• I used to envy the father of our race, dwelling as he did in contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so no more, because I have discovered that I also live in "creation's dawn." The morning stars still sing together, and the world, not yet half made, becomes more beautiful every day.
  • "Explorations in the Great Tuolumne Cañon", Overland Monthly (August, 1873); later republished in John of the Mountains (1938)

• "The water in music the oar forsakes." The air in music the wing forsakes. All things in move in music and write it. The mouse, lizard, and grasshopper sing together on the Turlock sands, sing with the morning stars.
  • Letter to Jeanne C. Carr, Yosemite (1874)

• No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in a way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains as to wilderness, as that which declares that the world was made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.
  • Wild Wool (1875)

• In God's wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.
  • Alaska Fragment (1890)

• Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.
  • Letter to his wife "Louie" (Louisa Wanda Strentzel), (July 1888); Life and Letters of John Muir (1924)

• Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common every-day beauty.
  • In the Sierra Foot-Hills (1894) Chapter 15

• Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.
  • "The National Parks and Forest Reservations", Sierra Club Bulletin Vol. 1, No. 7 (January 1896)

• Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature's darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature's sources never fail.
  • Our National Parks (1901)

• None of Nature's landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.
  • Our National Parks (1901)

• When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
  • Variant: When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
  • Variant: Tug on anything at all and you'll find it connected to everything else in the universe.
    • My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)

• Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.
  • My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)

• This time it is real - all must die, and where could mountaineer find a more glorious death.
  • My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) (excerpted in The Wild Muir ISBN 0-939666-75-8 page 38)

• 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 alike.
  • The Yosemite (1912)

• 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.
  • The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913)

• When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.
  • Travels in Alaska (1915)

• On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death...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, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.
  • A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, Ch. 4 - Camping Among the Tombs (1916)

• There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.
  • A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, Ch. 7 - A Sojourn in Cuba

Stickeen (1909)

These are a few quotes from the account Muir gave of his explorations in Alaska; for more on this incident see the page devoted to the story of Stickeen.

• There is no estimating the wit and wisdom concealed and latent in our lower fellow mortals until made manifest by profound experiences; for it is through suffering that dogs as well as saints are developed and made perfect.

• 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.

• No right way is easy in this rough world. We must risk our lives to save them.

• I have known many dogs, and many a story I could tell of their wisdom and devotion; but to none do I owe so much as to Stickeen. At first the least promising and least known of my dog-friends, he suddenly became the best known of them all. Our storm-battle for life brought him to light, and through him as through a window I have ever since been looking with deeper sympathy into all my fellow mortals.

John of the Mountains (1938)

Full title: John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir; Edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe (University of Wisconsin Press, 1938, republished 1979)

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

• I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

• The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

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

• It has been said that trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment rooted in the ground. But they never seem so to me. 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. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

• 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.

• How hard to realize that every camp of men or beast has this glorious starry firmament for a roof! In such places standing alone on the mountaintop it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make—leaves and moss like the marmots and birds, or tents or piled stone—we all dwell in a house of one room—the world with the firmament for its roof—and are sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track.

About John Muir

• Ordinarily, the man who loves the woods and mountains, the trees, the flowers, and the wild things, has in him some indefinable quality of charm, which appeals even to those sons of civilization who care for little outside of paved streets and brick walls. John Muir was a fine illustration of this rule. He was by birth a Scotchman— a tall and spare man, with the poise and ease natural to him who has lived much alone under conditions of labor and hazard. He was a dauntless soul, and also one brimming over with friendliness and kindliness.
  He was emphatically a good citizen. Not only are his books delightful, not only is he the author to whom all men turn when they think of the Sierras and northern glaciers, and the giant trees of the California slope, but he was also— what few nature lovers are— a man able to influence contemporary thought and action on the subjects to which he had devoted his life. He was a great factor in influencing the thought of California and the thought of the entire country so as to secure the preservation of those great natural phenomena— wonderful canyons, giant trees, slopes of flower-spangled hillsides— which make California a veritable Garden of the Lord.
  • Theodore Roosevelt in "John Muir: An Appreciation", Outlook Vol. 109 (16 January 1915)

• John Muir talked even better than he wrote. His greatest influence was always upon those who were brought into personal contact with him. But he wrote well, and while his books have not the peculiar charm that a very, very few other writers on similar subjects have had, they will nevertheless last long. Our generation owes much to John Muir.
  • Theodore Roosevelt in "John Muir: An Appreciation", Outlook (16 January 1915)

• No man was more influential than John Muir in preserving the Sierra's integrity. If I were to choose a single Californian to occupy the Hall of Fame, it would be this tenacious Scot who became a Californian during the final forty-six years of his life. It was John Muir whose knowledge wedded to zeal led men and governments to establish the National Park Service. Yosemite and Sequoia in California, the Petrified forest and the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and the glacier wilderness of Alaska are what they are today largely because of this one man, in whom learning and love were co-equal. More than any other, he was the answer to that call which appears on the Courts Building in Sacramento: Give me men to match my mountains.
  • Lawrence Clark Powell

• If you think about all the gains our society has made, from independence to now, it wasn't government. It was activism. People think, 'Oh, Teddy Roosevelt established Yosemite National Park, what a great president.' BS. It was John Muir who invited Roosevelt out and then convinced him to ditch his security and go camping. It was Muir, an activist, a single person.
  • Yvon Chouinard, in Sierra Magazine.

• John Muir has been a role model to generations of Californians and to conservationists around the world. He taught us to be active and to enjoy— but at the same time protect — our parks, our beaches, and our mountains.
  • California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, announcing the selection of the " John Muir-Yosemite Design" for the California State Quarter (March 29, 2004)

Sierra Club Bulletin - Memorial Issue

"John Muir Memorial Issue", Sierra Club Bulletin , Vol. 10, No. 1 (January, 1916)

• He was the patriarch of American lovers of mountains, one who had not only a passion for the splendours of Nature, but a wonderful power of interpreting her to men. The very air of the granite peaks, the very fragrance of the deep and solemn forest, seem to breathe round us and soothe our sense as we read the descriptions of his lonely wanderings in the Sierras when their majesty was first revealed. California may well honour the service of one who did so much to make known her charms and to shield them from desecration. And you of the Club will cherish the memory of a singularly pure and simple character, who was in his life all that a worshipper of nature ought to be.
  • James Bryce, British ambassador to the US, in a letter to the Sierra Club. (19 February 1915)

• His countrymen owe him gratitude as the pioneer of our system of national parks. Out of the fight which he led for the better care of the Yosemite by the State of California grew the demand for the extension of the system. To this many persons and organizations contributed, but Muir's writings and enthusiasm were the chief forces that inspired the movement. All the other torches were lighted from his.
  • Robert Underwood Johnson

• John Muir will never be fully appreciated by those whose minds are filled with money getting and the sordid things of modern every-day life. To such Muir is an enigma— a fanatic— visionary and impractical. There is nothing in common to arouse sympathetic interest. That anyone should spend his whole life in ascertaining the fundamental truths of nature and glory in their discovery with a joy that would put to shame even the religious zealot is to many utterly incomprehensible. That a man should brave the storms and thread the pathless wilderness, exult in the earthquake's violence, rejoice in the icy blasts of the northern glaciers, and that he should do all this alone and unarmed, year in and year out, is a marvel that but few can understand. These solitary explorations were quite in contrast with the usual heavily equipped expeditions which undertake such work. John Muir loved and gloried in this sort of life and approached it with an enthusiasm and power of will that made hardships and those things which most human beings consider essentials, mere trifles by comparison. He was willing to subordinate everything in life to this work which he had set out to do supremely well, and it is little wonder that he attained his goal.
  • William E. Colby, Secretary of the Sierra Club (1900-1945)

• The impression of his personality was so strong on those who knew him that all words seem cheap beside it. Those who never knew him can never, through any word of ours, be brought to realize what they have missed. He had a quaint, crisp way of talking, his literary style in fact, and none of the nature lovers, the men who know how to feel in the presence of great things and beautiful, have expressed their craft better than he.
  • David Starr Jordan, first President of Stanford University

• Never have I met another man of such singleness of mind in his devotion to nature as Muir. He lived and moved and had his being as a devotee. Of himself he took little heed, but no zealous missionary ever went abroad to spread the gospel with his fervor in communicating a love of nature. And with him a love of nature meant an understanding of her laws. Every tree and flower, every bird and stone was to him the outward token of an invisible world in process of making.... He sauntered over the mountains, claiming kinship with the rocks and growing things and gathering them all to his heart. He has told me that he found it necessary, in getting people to listen, to tell them stories such as his immortal tale of Stickeen , but the real hope in his heart was to awaken their interest so they would want to go to nature themselves and to delve into the mysteries of her ways.
  • Charles Keeler

• His simplicity was his power. He knew nature as no one else did... His affection for the commonplace little pine-needle was as genuine as that for the most beautiful flower or the grandest tree, and the little flakes of snow and the little crumbs of granite were each to him real life, and each has a personality worthy of his wonderful mind's attention; and he talked and wrote of them as he did of the ouzel or the Douglas squirrel— made real persons of them, and they talked and lived with him and were a part of his life as is our own flesh and blood. One cannot describe Mount Rainier, one cannot describe the Grand Canyon, one cannot describe his beloved Yosemite; humanity is silent in their presence. So it was with John Muir to all who knew him; so has his influence affected mankind, and so will his life and work impress generations to come. This most wonderful of men, lifted above death and time by his human sympathy no less than by his genius, will forever influence the world, and it will be the better for his example and his inspiration.
  • Robert B. Marshall

• To few men was it given to realize so completely the elements of eternity— of time-effacing enjoyment in work— as it was to John Muir. The secret of it all was in his soul, the soul of a child, of a poet, and of a strong man, all blended into one. An innate nobility of character, an unstudied reverence for all that is sublime in nature or in life, unconsciously called forth the best in his friends and acquaintances. In the spiritual as in the physical realm flowers blossomed in his footsteps where he went. After all it is to such men as John Muir that we must look for the sustenance of those finer feelings that keep men in touch with the spiritual meaning and beauty of the universe, and make them capable of understanding those rare souls whose insight has invested life with imperishable hope and charm. To all who knew John Muir intimately his gentleness and humaneness toward all creatures that shared the world with him, was one of the finest attributes of his character... Among those who have won title to remembrance as prophets and interpreters of nature he rises to a moral as well as poetical altitude that will command the admiring attention of men so long as human records shall endure.
  • William Frederic Badé