Top 280 John Muir Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Surely all God’s people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play.”

— John Muir

252. “There is no estimating the wit and wisdom concealed and latent in our lower fellow mortals until made manifest by profound experiences; for it is through suffering that dogs as well as saints are developed and made perfect.”

— John Muir

253. “The soft light of morning falls upon ripening forests of oak and elm, walnut and hickory, and all Nature is thoughtful and calm.”

— John Muir

254. “Living artificially in towns, we are sickly, and never come to know ourselves.”

— John Muir

255. “The tide of visitors will float slowly about the bottom of the valley as harmless scum collecting in hotel and saloon eddies, leaving the rocks and falls eloquent as ever.”

— John Muir

256. “Here are the roots of all the life of the valleys, and here more simply than elsewhere is the eternal flux of nature manifested.”

— John Muir

257. “Fortunately wrong cannot last. Soon or late it must fall back home to Hades, while some compensating good must surely follow.”

— John Muir

258. “It is always interesting to see people in dead earnest, from whatever cause, and earthquakes make everybody earnest.”

— John Muir

259. “It is a fine thing to see people in hot earnest about anything.”

— John Muir

260. “Night is coming on and I am filled with indescribable loneliness. Felt feverish; bathed in a black, silent stream;.”

— John Muir

261. “To myself, mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery; in them, and in the forms of inferior landscape that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up.”

— John Muir

262. “People are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home, that wilderness is a necessity.”

— John Muir

263. “Man and other civilized animals are the only creatures that ever become dirty.”

— John Muir

264. “Some people miss flesh as a drunkard misses his dram...”

— John Muir

265. “A man, in his books, may be said to walk the earth a long time after he is gone.”

— John Muir

266. “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.”

— John Muir

267. “Every morning, arising from the death of sleep, the happy plants and all our fellow animal creatures great and small, and even the rocks, seemed to be shouting, “Awake, awake, rejoice, rejoice, come love us and join in our song. Come! Come!”

— John Muir

268. “Come to the woods, for here is rest.”

— John Muir

269. “Go where we will, all the world over, we seem to have been there before.”

— John Muir

270. “We turned and sailed away, joining the outgoing bergs, while “gloria in excels is” still seemed to be sounding over all the white landscape, and our burning hearts were ready for any fate, feeling that whatever the future might have in store, the treasures we had gain would enrich our lives forever.”

— John Muir

271. “Plants, animals, and stars are all kept in place, bridled along appointed ways, with one another, and through the midst of one another – killing and being killed, eating and being eaten, in harmonious proportions and quantities.”

— John Muir

272. “Word lessons, in particular the wouldst couldst shouldst have loved kind, were kept up, with much warlike thrashing, until I had committed the whole of French, Latin, and English grammars to memory...”

— John Muir

273. “As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were God’s ways.”

— John Muir

274. “When one is alone at night in the depths of these woods, the stillness is at once awful and sublime. Every leaf seems to speak.”

— John Muir

275. “I tied a crust of bread to my belt, and with Carlo set out for the upper slopes of the Pilot Peak Ridge, and had a good day, notwithstanding the care of seeking the silly runaways.”

— John Muir

276. “Lake McDonald, full of brisk trout, is in the heart of this forest, and Avalanche Lake is ten miles above McDonald, at the feet of a group of glacier-laden mountains. Give a month at least to this precious reserve. The time will not be taken from the sum of your life.”

— John Muir

277. “Entering the Valley, gazing overwhelmed with the multitude of grand objects about us, perhaps the first to fix our attention will be the Bridal Veil, a beautiful waterfall on our right. Its brow, where it first leaps free from the cliff, is about 900 feet above us; and as it sways and sings in the wind, clad in gauzy, sun-sifted spray, half falling, half floating, it seems infinitely gentle and fine; but the hymns it sings tell the solemn fateful power hidden beneath its soft clothing.”

— John Muir

278. “What can poor mortals say about clouds?”

— John Muir

279. “I will follow my instincts, be myself for good or ill, and see what will be the upshot. As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”

— John Muir

280. “For many in towns it is a consuming, lifelong struggle; for others, the danger of coming to want is so great, the deadly habit of endless hoarding for the future is formed, which smothers all real life, and is continued long after every reasonable need has been over-supplied.”

— John Muir

281. “Now comes sundown. The west is all a glory of color transfiguring everything. Far up the Pilot Peak Ridge the radiant host of trees stand hushed and thoughtful, receiving the Sun’s good-night, as solemn and impressive a leave-taking as if sun and trees were to meet no more. The daylight fades, the color spell is broken, and the forest breathes free in the night breeze beneath the stars.”

— John Muir

282. “You’ll never make up what you lost today, I’ve been wandering through a thousand rooms of God’s crystal temple. I’ve been a thousand feet down in the crevasses, with matchless domes and sculpted figures and carved ice-work all about me. Solomon’s marble and ivory palaces were nothing to it. Such purity, such color, such delicate beauty! I was tempted to stay there and feed my soul, and softly freeze, until I would become part of the glacier. What a great death that would be.”

— John Muir

283. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers. 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

284. “Contemplating the lace-like fabric of streams outspread over the mountains, we are reminded that everything is flowing – going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water.”

— John Muir