John Muir Quotes

But I think there's something wonderful and extraordinary about climbing on your own and just that kind of relationship to the environment. I'm very addicted to the mountains. You know, so, I do like that solitude.

Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and numbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy.

I needed to be in the bush. There I find solitude and beauty and purity and focus. That's where my heart lies.

My recollection of a hundred lovely lakes has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.

I like to be grounded by nature, go hiking... go to an isolated island that's not glamorous and touristy at all.

When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me.

If you spend time alone in the wilderness, you get very attuned to living things.

Wilderness to the people of America is a spiritual necessity, an antidote to the high pressure of modern life, a means of regaining serenity and equilibrium.

I like, very much, nature. Since I'm always together with people, I like to retreat.

I did a lot of canoe tripping earlier on. I was on 10 trips, and I would get the feel of the forest and the wilderness, you know, that I always knew was in my soul to begin with.

If someone said, 'Think of a happy place for you,' I'd say a glacial plane near the South Pole, the wind howling, nobody in sight, a shack with a pot-belly stove and some tea.

Anywhere which is in a forest, that's my zen place.

I just love being in the middle of nowhere.

When I was a boy, one of my favorite places to go was a pine-filled hollow high on the mountain behind our house. It was a place where the industrial song of Coalwood subsided. I would sit on a dead log and listen to nothing except the beating of my own heart and the thoughts racing through my head.

My folks have a cottage north of Kingston, which is literally in the middle of nowhere, and I can be there very happily for like a week.

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.

There is magic in the feel of a paddle and the movement of a canoe, a magic compounded of distance, adventure, solitude, and peace. The way of a canoe is the way of the wilderness and of a freedom almost forgotten. It is an antidote to insecurity, the open door to waterways of ages past and a way of life with profound and abiding satisfactions. When a man is part of his canoe, he is part of all that canoes have ever known.

I miss the woods. Sometimes I go on weekend trips and just wander the woods, barefoot and reminiscing, and I put my contact lenses in. Is that weird?

In our bones we need the natural curves of hills, the scent of chaparral, the whisper of pines, the possibility of wildness.

O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap Of murky buildings: climb with me the steep,-- Nature's observatory--whence the dell, In flowery slopes, its river's crystal swell, May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep 'Mongst boughs pavilion'd, where the deer's swift leap Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell.

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

What a glorious time they must have in that wilderness, far from mankind and election day!

I learned to look up suddenly from a hatch or feeding frenzy and find myself momentarily removed from solid earth. I go fishing not to find myself but to lose myself

The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning.