The Perks Of Being A Wallflower Internet Archive
Melanie Wendelberger
CAUTION: There are an increasing number of misquotes attributed to John Muir widely circulated on the Internet and even in published books. The following quotes, by contrast, have been carefully vetted by Muir scholars and librarians, with a citation given to the original source. For permission to use these quotes, see Copyright Status of John Muir's Writings.
See our John Muir Misquoted page for more information. Note on Sources
Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean...
- John Muir quoted by Samuel Hall Young in Alaska Days with John Muir (1915) chapter 7, pg. 204.
For a visual representation, see Alaska Days with John Muir, page 204, on Internet Archive I'm losing the 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 quoted by Samuel Hall Young in Alaska Days with John Muir (1915), chapter 4, pg. 216.
For a visual representation, see Alaska Days with John Muir, page 216, on Internet Archive
"God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild."
Source for this version of this quote is: "The Scenery of California," California Early History: Commercial Position: Climate: Scenery. San Francisco: California State Board of Trade, 1897, 16.
(Available online at archive.org). See John Muir, in His Own Words: A Book of Quotations Compiled and Edited by Peter Browning, (Lafayette: Great West Books, 1988). Browning states: "This strong statement in a little-known state promotional brochure appeared later in a watered-down and grammatically incorrect version in a prominent periodical and a major book."
Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Here grow the wallflower and the violet. The squirrel will come and sit upon your knee, the logcock will wake you in the morning. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill. Of all the upness accessible to mortals, there is no upness comparable to the mountains.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 235. The quote as Wolfe records it appears in longer form with additional text in Muir's journal for August-November 1875, Sequoia Studies from Yosemite, South End of Belt at White River Image 44. John Muir Papers. 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.
No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movements of water, or gardening - still all is Beauty!
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 208.
In God's wildness lies the hope of the world - the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 317.
We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.
- June 9, 1872 letter to Miss Catharine Merrill, from New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite Valley, in Bad's Life and Letters of John Muir.
The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes, the heart of the people is always right.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 429
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 of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 295 (quoted in The Wilderness World of John Muir, edited by Edwin Way Teale, p. 313.)
Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common everyday beauty.
- The Mountains of California (1894) chapter 15.
Man must be made conscious of his origin as a child of Nature. Brought into right relationship with the wilderness he would see that he was not a separate entity endowed with a divine right to subdue his fellow creatures and destroy the common heritage, but rather an integral part of a harmonious whole. He would see that his appropriation of earth's resources beyond his personal needs would only bring imbalance and beget ultimate loss and poverty for all.
- by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, describing Muir's remedy for human misery in her book, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (1945) page 188.
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed -- chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. ... It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods -- trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries ... God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools -- only Uncle Sam can do that.
- Our National Parks (1901) chapter 10.
The natural and common is more truly marvelous and mysterious than the so-called supernatural. Indeed most of the miracles we hear of are infinitely less wonderful than the commonest of natural phenomena, when fairly seen.
My First Summer in the Sierra , chapter 7, 1911, page 133.
Range of Light:
Looking eastward from the summit of Pacheco Pass one shining morning, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld. At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, one rich furred garden of yellow Compositae. And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city.... Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light.
- The Yosemite (1912) chapter 1.
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....
- My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) chapter 4.
Surely all God's people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes - all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them.
- The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, (1913), pages 186-187
Everything is flowing -- going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks... While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood...in Nature's warm heart.
- My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) chapter 10.
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.
- My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) chapter 2.
This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 438.
Most people are on the world, not in it -- have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them -- undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.
- John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 320.
I used to envy the father of our race, dwelling as he did in contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so no more, because I have discovered that I also live in "creation's dawn." The morning stars still sing together, and the world, not yet half made, becomes more beautiful every day.
- "Explorations in the Great Tuolumne Caon," Overland Monthly, August, 1873; and John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 72.