Quote

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

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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
Away
Mountain
Money
Losing
Degenerating
Nature
News
Trivial
Nothing
Learning
Mountains
Must
Days
Precious
Men
Break
Machine
World
Learn
Machines
Making
Adventure

More quotes by John Muir

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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.
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The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.
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I will follow my instincts, be myself for good or ill, and see what will be the upshot.
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A little pure wildness is the one great present want, both of men and sheep.
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In nothing does man, with his grand notions of heaven and charity, show forth his innate, low-bred, wild animalism more clearly than in his treatment of his brother beasts. From the shepherd with his lambs to the red-handed hunter, it is the same no recognition of rights - only murder in one form or another.
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He had gone to the higher Sierras... [about Ralph Waldo Emerson's death]
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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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The grand show is eternal It is always sunrise somewhere
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In the woods is perpetual youth.
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…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.
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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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No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite.
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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.
John Muir
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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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Not blind opposition to progress,but opposition to blind progress.
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Some people miss flesh as a drunkard misses his dram.
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The bat­tle we have fought, and are still fight­ing for the forests is a part of the eter­nal con­flict between right and wrong, and we can­not expect to see the end of it. …So we must count on watch­ing and striv­ing for these trees, and should always be glad to find any­thing so surely good and noble to strive for.
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Our lives are rounded with a sleep.
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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 mountains are fountains not only of rivers and fertile soil, but of men.
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