Quote

I wish I knew where I was going. Doomed to be carried of the spirit into the wilderness, I suppose. I wish I could be more moderate in my desires, but I cannot, and so there is no rest.

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
Destiny
Rest
Moderate
Knew
Moderates
Wish
Doomed
Desire
Carried
Wilderness
Spirit
Desires
Cannot
Suppose
Going

More quotes by John Muir

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Man is always and everywhere a blight on the landscape.
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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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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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There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation's braggart lords.
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He had gone to the higher Sierras... [about Ralph Waldo Emerson's death]
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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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In the beauty and grandeur of individual trees, and in number and variety of species, the Sierra forests surpass all others
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...full of God's thoughts, a place of peace and safety amid the most exalted grandeur and enthusiastic action, a new song, a place of beginnings abounding in first lessons of life, mountain building, eternal, invincible, unbreakable order with sermons in stone, storms, trees, flowers, and animals brimful with humanity.
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We all flow from one fountain.
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There is a love of wild nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties
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Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or little we may be able to read them telling their wanderings even by their scents alone.
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Going to the mountains is going home.
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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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But no temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life...as if into this one mountain mansion Nature had gathered her choicest treasures.
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I wonder if leaves feel lonely when they see their neighbors falling?
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The tide of visitors will float slowly about the bottom of the valley as harmless scum collecting in hotel and saloon eddies, leaving the rocks and falls eloquent as ever.
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No Sierra landscape that I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in manufactories is called rubbish or waste everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons.
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Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go for the mountains are fountains – beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.
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There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.
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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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