Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" The dispersal of juniper seeds is effected by the plum and cherry plan of hiring birds at the cost of their board, and thus obtaining the use of a pair of extra good wings. "
John Muir
Good
Seeds
Plan
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
John Muir
Fool
Down
Run
" Beetles and butterflies are sometimes restricted to small areas. Each mountain in a range, and even the different zones of a mountain, may have its own peculiar species. But the house-fly seems to be everywhere. I wonder if any island in mid-ocean is flyless. "
John Muir
Mountain
Island
Small
" Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries. "
John Muir
Hunting
Birds
Hurt
" The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning, it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe. "
John Muir
God
Man
Great
" Storms of every sort, torrents, earthquakes, cataclysms, 'convulsions of nature,' etc., however mysterious and lawless at first sight they may seem, are only harmonious notes in the song of creation, varied expressions of God's love. "
John Muir
Creation
Song
Sight
" Bread without flesh is a good diet, as on many botanical excursions I have proved. Tea also may easily be ignored. Just bread and water and delightful toil is all I need - not unreasonably much, yet one ought to be trained and tempered to enjoy life in these brave wilds in full independence of any particular kind of nourishment. "
John Muir
Enjoy Life
Good
Life
" The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. "
John Muir
Forest
Universe
Wilderness
" In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. "
John Muir
More
Far
Wisdom
" How terribly downright must be the utterances of storms and earthquakes to those accustomed to the soft hypocrisies of society. "
John Muir
Earthquakes
How
Society
" 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
Trees
Disease
Fools
" No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment. "
John Muir
Will
Forget
Tree
" As soon as a redwood is cut down or burned, it sends up a crowd of eager, hopeful shoots, which, if allowed to grow, would in a few decades attain a height of a hundred feet, and the strongest of them would finally become giants as great as the original tree. "
John Muir
Grow
Tree
Great
" Of all the mountain ranges I have climbed, I like the Sierra Nevada the best. "
John Muir
Mountain
Nevada
Sierra
" Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature's forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle. "
John Muir
Home
Nature
Struggle
" I bade adieu to mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God. "
John Muir
Life
Rest
Devote
" The wild Indian power of escaping observation, even where there is little or no cover to hide in, was probably slowly acquired in hard hunting and fighting lessons while trying to approach game, take enemies by surprise, or get safely away when compelled to retreat. "
John Muir
Hunting
Fighting
Game
" The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual. "
John Muir
Poetry
Spiritual
Civilization
" Under the Timber and Stone Act of 1878, which might well have been called the 'Dust and Ashes Act,' any citizen of the United States could take up one hundred and sixty acres of timber land and, by paying two dollars and a half an acre for it, obtain title. "
John Muir
Two
Well
Ashes
" There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation's braggart lords. "
John Muir
Control
Power
May
" Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul. "
John Muir
Soul
Health
Nature
" In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times. "
John Muir
Start
Wild
Travel
" The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain - a magic wand in Nature's hand - every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this? "
John Muir
Tree
Power
Beauty
" During my first years in the Sierra, I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite. "
John Muir
Warm
Trees
Best
" The coniferous forests of the Yosemite Park, and of the Sierra in general, surpass all others of their kind in America, or indeed the world, not only in the size and beauty of the trees, but in the number of species assembled together, and the grandeur of the mountains they are growing on. "
John Muir
Together
Beauty
Kind
" Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you. "
John Muir
Nature
Water
Youth
" It seems strange that bears, so fond of all sorts of flesh, running the risks of guns and fires and poison, should never attack men except in defense of their young. How easily and safely a bear could pick us up as we lie asleep! Only wolves and tigers seem to have learned to hunt man for food, and perhaps sharks and crocodiles. "
John Muir
Food
Wolves
Risks
" The world, we are told, was made especially for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God's universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves. "
John Muir
Facts
God
Men
" One may as well dam for water tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man. "
John Muir
Temple
Heart
Man
" From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals. "
John Muir
Earth
Creator
Us
" A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. "
John Muir
Enthusiasm
Silent
Storm