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Books are but stepping stones to show you where other minds have been.

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
Minds
Books
Show
Shows
Book
Mind
Stepping
Stones

More quotes by John Muir

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Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.
John Muir
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Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.
John Muir
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He had gone to the higher Sierras... [about Ralph Waldo Emerson's death]
John Muir
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Man has injured every animal he has touched.
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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Over the summit, I saw the so-called Mono desert lying dreamily silent in the thick, purple light -- a desert of heavy sun-glare beheld from a desert of ice-burnished granite.
John Muir
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How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! To behold this alone is worth the pains of any excursion a thousand times over. The highest peaks burned like islands in a sea of liquid shade. Then the lower peaks and spires caught the glow, and long lances of light, streaming through many a notch and pass, fell thick on the frozen meadows.
John Muir
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Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions.
John Muir
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In the eternal youth of Nature, you may renew your own.
John Muir
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I wonder if leaves feel lonely when they see their neighbors falling?
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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In the beauty and grandeur of individual trees, and in number and variety of species, the Sierra forests surpass all others
John Muir
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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.
John Muir
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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.
John Muir
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The moon is looking down into the canyon, and how marvelously the great rocks kindle to her light! Every dome, and brow, and swelling boss touched by her white rays, glows as if lighted with snow.
John Muir
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The mountains are fountains not only of rivers and fertile soil, but of men.
John Muir
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I...am always glad to touch the living rock again and dip my hand in the high mountain air.
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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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.
John Muir
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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.
John Muir