It is always interesting to see people in dead earnest, from whatever cause, and earthquakes make everybody earnest.
One should go to the woods for safety, if for nothing else.
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.
So also there are tides and floods in the affairs of men, which in some are slight and may be kept within bounds, but in others they overmaster everything.
How narrow we selfish conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation!
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 Big Tree is Nature’s forest masterpiece, and so far as I know, the greatest of living things.
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.
I made these Sierra trips, carrying only a sackful of bread with a little tea and sugar, and was thus independent and free...
My meals were easily made, for they were all alike and simple, only a cupful of tea and bread.
I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found.
No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite.
John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe.
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.
The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.
Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the unreal. Yet is true imagination healthful and real, no more likely to mislead than the coarse senses. Indeed, the power of imagination makes us infinite.
I wandered away on a glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted nearly fifty years and is not yet completed, always happy and free, poor and rich, without thought of a diploma or of making a name, urged on and on through endless, inspiring Godful beauty.
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.
The water in music the oar forsakes. The air in music the wing forsakes. All things in move in music and write it. The mouse, lizard, and grasshopper sing together on the Turlock sands, sing with the morning stars.
Thus godlike sympathy grows and thrives and spreads far beyond the teachings of churches and schools, where too often the mean, blinding, loveless doctrine is taught that animals have no rights that we are bound to respect, and were only made for man, to be petted, spoiled, slaughtered or enslaved.