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

More quotes by John Muir

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I like to walk, touch living Mother Earth—bare feet best, and thrill every step. Used to envy happy reptiles that had advantage of so much body in contact with earth, bosom to bosom. [We] live with our heels as well as head and most of our pleasure comes in that way.
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Our lives are rounded with a sleep.
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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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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.
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Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.
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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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What is worthwhile in life? I think it is worth living and dreaming. If you don't you may be dead anyhow - inside.
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Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
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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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I have enjoyed the trees & scenery of KY exceedingly. How shall I ever tell of the miles & miles of beauty that have been flowing into me in such measure?
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The most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wilderness.
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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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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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Many of Nature's finest lessons are to be found in her storms, and if careful to keep in right relations with them, we may go safely abroad with them, rejoicing in the grandeur and beauty of their works and ways.
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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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One can make a day of any size and regulate the rising and setting of his own sun and the brightness of its shining.
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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.
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Quench love, and what is left of a man's life but the folding of a few jointed bones and square inches of flesh? Who would call that life?
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All the world was before me and every day was a holiday, so it did not seem important to which one of the world's wildernesses I first should wander.
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Some people miss flesh as a drunkard misses his dram.
John Muir