Quote

When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe ... The whole wilderness is unity and interrelation, is alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly.

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
Trying
Universe
Familiar
Science
Pick
Else
Picks
Hitched
Seems
Stones
Talkative
Anything
Seem
Brotherly
Find
Humanity
Sympathetic
Everything
Full
Wilderness
Whole
Alive
Unity

More quotes by John Muir

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Man is always and everywhere a blight on the landscape.
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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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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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He had gone to the higher Sierras... [about Ralph Waldo Emerson's death]
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Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts . . .
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In every country the mountains are fountains, not only of rivers but of men. Therefore we all are born mountaineers, the offspring of rock and sunshine.
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Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the unreal. Yet is true imagination healthful and real, no more likely to mislead than the coarse senses. Indeed, the power of imagination makes us infinite.
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Raindrops blossom brilliantly in the rainbow, and change to flowers in the sod, but snow comes in full flower direct from the dark, frozen sky.
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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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This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere the dew is never dried all at once a shower is forever falling vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
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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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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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Books are but stepping stones to show you where other minds have been.
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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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Wherever we go in the mountains, we find more than we seek.
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Any fool can destroy trees, they cannot run away.
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Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.
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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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...therefore all childish fear must be put away.
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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.
John Muir