Top 280 John Muir Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The mountains are calling and I must go.”

— John Muir

Featured in: Nature Quotes

2. “Going to the mountains is going home.”

— John Muir

3. “The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.”

— John Muir

Featured in: Nature Quotes

4. “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.”

— John Muir

Featured in: Nature Quotes

5. “The power of imagination makes us infinite.”

— John Muir

6. “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

— John Muir

Featured in: Nature Quotes, Adventure Quotes

7. “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”

— John Muir

Featured in: Nature Quotes

8. “I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”

— John Muir

Featured in: Nature Quotes

9. “Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.”

— John Muir

10. “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 away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”

— John Muir

Featured in: Peace Quotes

11. “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

12. “Nothing truly wild is unclean.”

— John Muir

13. “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

— John Muir

14. “Keep close to Nature’s heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”

— John Muir

Featured in: Quotes About Heart

15. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

— John Muir

16. “One day's exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books.”

— John Muir

17. “Most people are on the world, not in it.”

— John Muir

18. “I’d rather be in the mountains thinking of God, than in church thinking about the mountains.”

— John Muir

19. “We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men.”

— John Muir

20. “How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains.”

— John Muir

21. “Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing.”

— John Muir

22. “As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”

— John Muir

Featured in: Quotes About Heart

23. “Most people who travel look only at what they are directed to look at. Great is the power of the guidebook maker, however ignorant.”

— John Muir

24. “I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness.”

— John Muir

25. “Earth has no sorrow that earth can not heal.”

— John Muir

26. “We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.”

— John Muir

27. “Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.”

— John Muir

Featured in: Running Quotes

28. “The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts.”

— John Muir

29. “Tug on anything in nature and you will find it connected to everything else.”

— John Muir

30. “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity...”

— John Muir

31. “It may not be easy, life isn’t easy, but dreams keep you alive.”

— John Muir

32. “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.”

— John Muir

Featured in: Quotes About the Sea

33. “This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”

— John Muir

34. “Wander a whole summer if you can. Time will not be taken from the sum of life. Instead of shortening, it will definitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal.”

— John Muir

Featured in: Summer Quotes

35. “When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.”

— John Muir

36. “The sun shines not on us but in us.”

— John Muir

37. “Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done and suffered by her creatures. All scars she heals, whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts.”

— John Muir

38. “Society speaks and all men listen, mountains speak and wise men listen.”

— John Muir

39. “Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.”

— John Muir

40. “To sit in solitude, to think in solitude with only the music of the stream and the cedar to break the flow of silence, there lies the value of wilderness.”

— John Muir

41. “In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world.”

— John Muir

42. “I am well again, I came to life in the cool winds and crystal waters of the mountains.”

— John Muir

43. “I will follow my instincts, and be myself for good or ill.”

— John Muir

44. “I might have become a millionaire, but I chose to become a tramp.”

— John Muir

45. “Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.”

— John Muir

46. “Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature’s darlings.”

— John Muir

Featured in: Hiking Quotes

47. “Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.”

— John Muir

48. “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

Featured in: Study Quotes

49. “Of all the fire mountains which like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest.”

— John Muir

50. “Doubly happy, however, is the man to whom lofty mountain tops are within reach.”

— John Muir

Featured in: Hiking Quotes