John Muir
“A queer...jolly fellow is the grasshopper...He seemed brimful of glad, hilarious energy, manifested by springing into the air to a height of twenty or thirty feet, then diving and springing up again and making a sharp musical rattle just as the lowest point in the descent was reached. Up and down a dozen times or so he danced and sang, then alighted to rest, then up and at it again...The life of this comic redlegs, the mountain's merriest child, seems to be made up of pure, condensed gayety... Nature in him seems to be snapping her fingers in the face of all earthly dejection and melancholy witha boysih hip-hip-hurrah.”
“After dark, went out to the shore--not a breath of air astir, the lake a perfect mirror reflecting the sky and mountains with their stars and trees and wonderful sculpture, all their grandeur refined and doubled, a marvelously impressive picture that seemed to belong more to heaven than earth.”
“All things move in music and write it.”
“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”
“Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God's mountains.”
“How fine Nature's methods! How deeply with beauty is beauty overlaid!”
“I cannot refrain from speaking to this little bush at my side and to the spray drops that come to my paper and to the individual sands of the slopelet I am sitting upon.”
“...I chose to become a tramp! ...to go by the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way... by crooked, unanticipated paths, fast or slow, zigzagging like a butterfly...to whirl...like a leaf in every eddy, ...dance compliance to any wind.”
“I had a good time in Europe and New York, but it seemed very hard work to travel in a civilized tourist way and I got very tired of it.”
“I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself. Not that Nature manifests any such thing as selfish isolation. In the making of every animal the presence of every other animal has been recognized. Indeed, every atom in creation may be said to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality; no matter, therefore, what may be the note which any creature forms in the song of existence, it is made first for itself, then more and more remotely for all the world and worlds... and harmony results.”
“I never tried to abandon creeds or codes of civilization; they went away of their own accord, melting and evaporating noiselessly without any effort and without leaving any consciousness of loss.”
“I quietly wandered away...happy and free, poor and rich. I traveled free as a bird, independent alike of roads and people. I entered at once into harmonious relations with Nature like young bees making their first excursion to a flower garden. Faculties were set in motion, fed and filled. The vague unrest and longings...vanished...I felt a plain, simple relationship to the cosmos.”
“I was tormented with soul hunger. I began to doubt whether I was fully born...I was on the world. But was I in it?”
“Ink cannot tell the glow that lights me at this moment in turning to the mountains...”
“Never while anything is left of me shall this... camp be forgotten. It has fairly grown into me, not merely as memory pictures, but as part and parcel of mind and body alike.”
“Nothing can be done well at a speed of forty miles a day. The multitude of mixed, novel impressions rapidly piled on one another make only a dreamy, bewildering, swirling blur, most of which is unrememberable. Far more time should be taken. Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grass and gentians of glacier meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of Nature's darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”
“So abundant and novel are the objects of interest in a pure wilderness that unless you are pursuing special studies it matters little where you go, or how often to the same place. Wherever you chance to be always seems at the moment of all places the best; and you feel that there can be no happiness in this world or in any other for those who may not be happy here.”
“So extravagant is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert.”
“The battle for conservation will go on endlessly. It is part of the universal warfare between right and wrong.”
“The shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, storms, the pounding of waves, the uprush of sap in plants, each and all tell the orderly love-beats of nature's heart.”
“The water in music the oar forsakes. The air in music the wing forsakes. All things move in music and write it. The mouse, lizard, and grasshopper sing together on the Turlock sands, sing with the morning stars.”
“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as foundations of timber and irrigating rivers, but as foundations of life.”
“To the sane and free it will hardly seem necessary to cross the continent in search of wild beauty, however easy the way, for they find it in abundance wherever they chance to be. Like Thoreau they see forests in orchards and patches of huckleberry brush, and oceans in ponds and drops of dew. Few in these hot, strenuous times are quite sane or free; choked with care like clocks full of dust, laboriously doing so much good and making so much money--or so little--they are no longer good for themselves.”
“What can poor mortals say about clouds? While a description of their huge glowing domes and ridges, shadowy gulfs and canyons and feather-edged ravines is being tried, they vanish, leaving no visible ruins. Nevertheless, these fleeting sky mountains are as substantial and significant as the more lasting upheavals of granite beneath them. Both alike are built up and die, and in God's calendar difference of duration is nothing. We can only dream about them in wondering, worshiping admiration...glad to know that not a crystal or vapor particle of them, hard or soft, is lost; that they sink and vanish only to rise again and again in higher and higher beauty.”
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
“Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing.”