Quote

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.

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
Littles
Anything
Live
Lifetime
Little
College
Time
Ready
Like
Study
Dies
Else

More quotes by John Muir

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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.
John Muir
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Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away and if they could, they would still be destroyed-chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got of their bark hides.
John Muir
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Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
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.
John Muir
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In this silent, serene wilderness the weary can gain a heart-bath in perfect peace.
John Muir
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Going into the woods, is going home
John Muir
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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.
John Muir
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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.
John Muir
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A little pure wildness is the one great present want, both of men and sheep.
John Muir
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Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.
John Muir
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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.
John Muir
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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.
John Muir
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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.
John Muir
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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.
John Muir
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I've had a great time in South America and South Africa. Indeed it now seems that on this pair of wild hot continents I've enjoyed the most fruitful year of my life.
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.
John Muir
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Government protection should be thrown around every wild grove and forest on the mountains, as it is around every private orchard, and the trees in public parks. To say nothing of their value as fountains of timber, they are worth infinitely more than all the gardens and parks of towns.
John Muir
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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.
John Muir
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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.
John Muir
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But to gain a perfect view, one must go yet further, over a curving brow to a slight shelf on the extreme brink.
John Muir