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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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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
Pure
Present
Littles
Little
Great
Men
Wildness
Sheep

More quotes by 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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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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Wilderness is a necessity... there must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls.
John Muir
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…their eager, childlike attention was refreshing to see as compared with the decent, deathlike apathy of weary civilized people, in whom natural curiosity has been quenched in toil and care and poor, shallow comfort.
John Muir
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Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings.
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
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To the lover of pure wildness Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.
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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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.
John Muir
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God cannot save them from fools.
John Muir
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Going into the woods, is going home
John Muir
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Hiking. I don't like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains...the se mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them.
John Muir
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The grand show is eternal It is always sunrise somewhere
John Muir
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...therefore all childish fear must be put away.
John Muir
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I wonder if leaves feel lonely when they see their neighbors falling?
John Muir
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How infinitely superior to our physical senses are those of the mind!
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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The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains - mountain dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops.
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 . . .
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.
John Muir