Explore our collection of John Muir quotes –the influential naturalist and preservationist– to inspire and encourage us to protect the environment.
John Muir is one of the most iconic naturalists and environmental advocates in history. Born in Scotland on April 21, 1838, he moving out west to California at age twenty–eight. Muir spent much of his life exploring Yosemite Valley as well as other national parks throughout the United States like Yellowstone and Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve.
He’s best known for being an important voice in the formation of National Parks and a leader of the conservation movement. So, sometimes he referred to as the “Father of the National Parks.”
His writings and activism helped to preserve wild spaces for generations to come. In this article, we will explore some of the most memorable John Muir quotes about nature, mountain, adventure, hiking, and more.
From simple joys to profound insights, his quotes will bring a sense of peace and clarity to your life. So, lets dive some of the best John Muir quotes and explore how they can inspire us to appreciate nature more deeply.
Famous John Muir quotes
As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing.
John Muir
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
John Muir
Wilderness is a necessity… there must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls.
John Muir
The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us. Thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.
John Muir
The sun shines not on us but in us.
John Muir
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
John Muir
To sit in solitude, to think in solitude with only the music of the stream and the cedar to break the flow of silence, there lies the value of wilderness.
John Muir
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.
John Muir
Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.
John Muir
How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains.
John Muir
John Muir quotes mountains
Check out these ten John Muir quotes about mountains to capture the majesty and beauty of these towering natural wonders. They will inspiring us to appreciate and protect them.
The mountains are calling and I must go.
John Muir
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.
John Muir
But no temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life…as if into this one mountain mansion Nature had gathered her choicest treasures.
John Muir
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 away from you like the leaves of Autumn.
John Muir
The blessings of one mountain day, whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever.
John Muir
Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts.
John Muir
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.
John Muir
I’d rather be in the mountains thinking of God, than in church thinking about the mountains.
John Muir
Thousands of tired, nerve–shaken, over–civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.
John Muir
Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest!
John Muir
John Muir quotes nature
Muir’s wisdom continue to inspire us to connect with the nature wonders. Here are ten John Muir quotes to make us appreciate nature even more:
I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can”.
John Muir
In the eternal youth of Nature, you may renew your own.
John Muir
I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
John Muir
Both ocean and sky are already about as rosy as possible the one with stars, the other with dulse, and foam, and wild light.
John Muir
In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.
John Muir
There are no accidents in Nature. Every motion of the constantly shifting bodies in the world is timed to the occasion for some definite, fore–ordered end. The flowers blossom in obedience to the same law that marks the course of constellations, and the song of a bird is the echo of a universal symphony.
John Muir
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.
John Muir
God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.
John Muir
Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.
John Muir
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
John Muir
John Muir quotes about trees
Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.
John Muir
Yosemite Park… None can escape its charms. Its natural beauty cleans and warms like a fire, and you will be willing to stay forever in one place like a tree.
John Muir
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.
John Muir
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.
John Muir
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 of their bark hides.
John Muir
When a man plants a tree, he plants himself.
John Muir
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.
John Muir
The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes, the heart of the people is always right.
John Muir
The Big Tree is Nature’s forest masterpiece, and so far as I know, the greatest of living things.
John Muir
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.
John Muir
Yosemite John Muir quotes
No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite.
John Muir
In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world.
John Muir
Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic repose; others, absolutely sheer or nearly so for thousands of feet, advance beyond their companions in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike, seemingly aware, yet heedless, of everything going on about them.
John Muir
I must return to the mountains–to Yosemite. I am told that the winter storms there will not be easily borne, but I am bewitched, enchanted, and tomorrow I must start for the great temple to listen to the winter songs and sermons preached and sung only there.
John Muir
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.
John Muir
This natural beauty–hunger is made manifest in the little window–sill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National parks – the Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc. – Nature’s sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world.
John Muir
There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.
John Muir
Most people are on the world, not in it.
John Muir
Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both solitude and society.
John Muir
Ink cannot tell the glow that lights me at this moment in turning to the mountains. I feel strong [enough] to leap Yosemite walls at a bound.
John Muir
John Muir quotes about God
Here are ten Joh Muir quotes about God!
God never made an ugly landscape. All that sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.
John Muir
The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted.
John Muir
Look! Nature is overflowing with the grandeur of God!
John Muir
Surely all God’s people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play.
John Muir
All wilderness seems to be full of tricks and plans to drive and draw us up into God’s light.
John Muir
All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters but little where we go, to highlands or lowlands, woods or plains, on the sea or land or down among the crystals of waves or high in a balloon in the sky; through all the climates, hot or cold, storms and calms, everywhere and always we are in God’s eternal beauty and love. So universally true is this, the spot where we chance to be always seems the best.
John Muir
God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons.
John Muir
No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movements of water, or gardening – still all is Beauty!
John Muir
Listen to them! How wholly infused with God is this one big word of love that we call the world!
John Muir
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.
John Muir
John Muir quotes about life
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.
John Muir
I am well again, I came to life in the cool winds and crystal waters of the mountains.
John Muir
No right way is easy in this rough world. We must risk our lives to save them.
John Muir
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.
John Muir
Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.
John Muir
Wander a whole summer if you can. Time will not be taken from the sum of life. Instead of shortening, it will definitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal.
John Muir
Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.
John Muir
One learns that the world, though made, is yet being made; that this is still the morning of creation; that mountains long conceived are now being born, channels traced for coming rivers, basins hollowed for lakes.
John Muir
It may not be easy, life isn’t easy, but dreams keep you alive.
John Muir
One can make a day of any size and regulate the rising and setting of his own sun and the brightness of its shining.
John Muir
John Muir quotes about death
Check out these 10 John Muir quotes that speak about dying and death:
Like trees in autumn shedding their leaves, going to dust like beautiful days to night, proclaiming as with the tongues of angels the natural beauty of death.
John Muir
On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death.
John Muir
The grave has no victory, for it never fights.
John Muir
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.
John Muir
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.
John Muir
Death is a kind nurse saying, “Come, children, to bed and get up in the morning” a gracious mother calling her children home.”
John Muir
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
John Muir
There need be no lasting sorrow for the death of any of Nature’s creations, because for every death there is always born a corresponding life.
John Muir
If the death exhalations that brood the broad towns in which we so fondly compact ourselves were made visible, we should flee as from a plague. All are more or less sick; there is not a perfectly sane man in San Francisco.
John Muir
This time it is real – all must die, and where could mountaineer find a more glorious death!
John Muir
John Muir quotes about hiking
Hiking – I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not hike! Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, “A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte–terre–ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.”
John Muir
Society speaks and all men listen, mountains speak and wise men listen.
John Muir
Going to the mountains is going home.
John Muir
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.
John Muir
Doubly happy, however, is the man to whom lofty mountain tops are within reach.
John Muir
Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer.
John Muir
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.
John Muir
In every walk in nature one receives far more than he seeks.
John Muir
I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
John Muir
The life of a mountaineer seems to be particularly favorable to the development of soul–life, as well as limb–life, each receiving abundance of exercise and abundance of food.
John Muir
John Muir quotes about adventure
Check out these ten John Muir quotes to spark your adventurous spirit!
Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action.
John Muir
What is worthwhile in life? I think it is worth living and dreaming. If you don’t you may be dead anyhow – inside.
John Muir
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
John Muir
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.
John Muir
None of Nature’s landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.
John Muir
I am losing 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 to learn the news
John Muir
The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.
John Muir
How many hearts with warm, red blood in them are beating under cover of the woods, and how many teeth and eyes are shining? A multitude of animal people, intimately related to us, but of whose lives we know almost nothing, are as busy about their own affairs as we are about ours.
John Muir
There is a love of wild nature in everybody, an ancient mother–love showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties.
John Muir
One day’s exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books.
John Muir
Final thoughts
These John Muir quotes can inspire us to take better care of our environment and appreciate the beauty of nature. His appreciation for the natural world and his commitment to protecting it can be seen in all of his quotes.
We should all strive to practice similar behaviors in our everyday lives and make an effort to leave the world in better shape than we found it. By remembering the wisdom of one who had such a deep understanding of nature, we can all help contribute to a more sustainable future.
Did you enjoy our John Muir quotes? Did any these quotes speak and resonate with you? If so, share these john muir quotes among our families and friends. So that we can all join together in honoring the beauty of nature.
As we reflect on his words, take some time to appreciate the beauty of nature, as we can all benefit from a deep connection to the outdoors. Share his words with others and encourage them to explore their natural surroundings. Let us celebrate the legacy from “John of the Mountains” and protect the Mother Nature!