Quote

Yet how hard most people work for mere dust and ashes and care, taking no thought of growing in knowledge and grace, never having time to get in sight of their own ignorance.

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
Thought
Dust
Care
Mere
Hard
Sight
Work
Ignorance
Never
Taking
Time
Grace
People
Growing
Knowledge
Ashes

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We all flow from one fountain.
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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.
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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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He had gone to the higher Sierras... [about Ralph Waldo Emerson's death]
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I never saw a discontented tree.
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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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Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
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Writing is like the life of a glacier one eternal grind.
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Wilderness is a necessity ... They will see what I meant in time. There must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls. Food and drink is not all. There is the spiritual. In some it is only a germ, of course, but the germ will grow.
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Man is always and everywhere a blight on the landscape.
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At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed like devout worshippers waiting to be blessed.
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The Big Tree is Nature's forest masterpiece, and so far as I know, the greatest of living things.
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I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found.
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See how God writes history. No technical knowledge is required only a calm day and a calm mind.
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Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds or the music of water written in river-lines?
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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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The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.
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I've had a great time in South America and South Africa. Indeed it now seems that on this pair of wild hot continents I've enjoyed the most fruitful year of my life.
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Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions.
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To ask me whether I could endure to live without friends is absurd. It is easy enough to live out of material sight of friends, but to live without human love is impossible.
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