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One may as well dam for water tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.

John Muir

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John Muir
Age: 76 †
Born: 1838
Born: April 21
Died: 1914
Died: December 24
Author
Autobiographer
Botanist
Conservationist
Ecologist
Engineer
Essayist
Explorer
Geologist
Glaciologist
Inventor
Mountaineer
Naturalist
J. Muir
Churches
Holier
Well
Commercialism
Heart
Temples
Consecrated
Men
Wilderness
Dams
People
Church
Sierra
Water
Cathedrals
May
Tanks
Ever
Temple
Wells

More quotes by John Muir

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Word lessons, in particular the wouldst couldst shouldst have loved kind, were kept up, with much warlike thrashing, until I had committed the whole of French, Latin, and English grammars to memory.
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Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.
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Every atom in creation may be said to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality.
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When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
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The United States government has always been proud of the welcome it has extended to good men of every nation, seeking freedom and homes and bread.
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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
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Most people who travel look only at what they are directed to look at. Great is the power of the guidebook maker, however ignorant.
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I should study Nature's laws in all their crossings and unions I should follow magnetic streams to their source and follow the shores of our magnetic oceans. I should go among the rays of the aurora, and follow them to their beginnings, and study their dealings and communications with other powers and expressions of matter.
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Do behold the king in his glory, King Sequoia. Behold! Behold! seems all I can say.... Well may I fast, not from bread but from business, bookmaking, duty doing & other trifles.... I’m in the woods woods woods, & they are in mee-ee-ee.... I wish I were wilder & so bless Sequoia I will be.
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The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God for they were the best he ever planted.
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Going to the mountains is going home.
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So extraordinary is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert. And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees.
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Society doesn't need that everybody is behaving in the full normal way... like people in a Buddhist monastery... But eccentricity may also connect with the irrational.
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Tug on anything in nature and you will find it connected to everything else.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A lifetime is so little a time that we die before we get ready to live. I should like to study at a college, but then I have to say to myself: You will die before you can do anything else.
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Rivers flow not past, but through us tingling, vibrating, exciting every cell and fiber in our bodies, making them sing and glide.
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As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. 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