Quote

…their eager, childlike attention was refreshing to see as compared with the decent, deathlike apathy of weary civilized people, in whom natural curiosity has been quenched in toil and care and poor, shallow comfort.

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
Attention
Toil
Poor
Shallow
Natural
Weary
Care
Compared
Quenched
People
Civilized
Refreshing
Decent
Childlike
Curiosity
Eager
Comfort
Apathy

More quotes by John Muir

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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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Some people miss flesh as a drunkard misses his dram.
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No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite.
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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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It is a vast wilderness of rocks in a sea of light, colored and glowing like oak and maple in autumn, when the sun gold is richest
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Come to the woods, for here is rest.
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Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer.
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He had gone to the higher Sierras... [about Ralph Waldo Emerson's death]
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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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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.
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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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The world, we are told, was made especially for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?
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Anyhow we never know where we must go, nor what guides we are to get - -people,storms, guardian angels, or sheep.
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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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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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These beautiful days ... do not exist as mere pictures - maps hung upon the walls of memory to brighten at times when touched by association or will ... They saturate themselves into every part of the body and live always.
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I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
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Wherever we go in the mountains, we find more than we seek.
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All Nature's wildness tells the same story: the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring, thundering waves and floods, the silent uprush of sap in plants, storms of every sort, each and all, are the orderly, beauty-making love-beats of Nature's heart.
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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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