John Muir Quotes

Hiking - I don't like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not hike! Do you know the origin of that word 'saunter?' It's a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, "A la sainte terre,' 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them."

To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language.

Whether you live in the city or in the country, creating time for a leisurely ramble is an easy thing to do.

I want a guy I can go hiking with, who wants to do outdoorsy stuff. It's so much fun to be out in nature and who better to do that with than the person you're dating?

I love not man the less, but Nature more.

My dream date would be a hike through the woods followed by an outdoor picnic followed by a glass of wine at sunset. Heaven!

Barring love and war, few enterprises are undertaken with such abandon, or by such diverse individuals, or with so paradoxical a mixture of appetite and altruism, as that group of avocations known as outdoor recreation. It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature. But wherein lies the goodness, and what can be done to encourage its pursuit?

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.

I think that I probably inevitably fetishize nature, although I try not to, because it's kind of embarrassing, repulsive behavior. I think it's just an extension of me being old-fashioned.

There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.

I think people love nature after they experience it. I know I experienced it as a young man - I took a lot of hikes, I was involved in scouting.

It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.

Somewhere, I had received the impression that Fine Folks were people who did the best they could with the sense they had, but Aunt Alexandra was of the opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer a family had been squatting on one patch of land the finer it was.

We do not work for men. We work for the land and the people. We do not even work for money.

If God had not permitted the people of Jerusalem to be torn asunder and driven them from the land, but had let them keep it after before, no one could convince them that they are not God's chosen people.

God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice... Our finest moments have come when we faithfully served the cause of justice for our own citizens, and for the people of other lands.

There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.

TThe most effective way to save the threatened and decimated natural world is to cause people to fall in love with it again, with its beauty and its reality.

That's where peace begins - not just in the plans of leaders, but in the hearts of people. Not just in some carefully designed process, but in the daily connections - that sense of empathy that takes place among those who live together in this land and in this sacred city of Jerusalem.

In the desert we rediscover the value of what is essential for living; thus in today's world there are innumerable signs, often expressed implicitly or negatively, of the thirst for God, for the ultimate meaning of life. And in the desert people of faith are needed who, by the example of their own lives, point out the way to the Promised Land and keep hope alive.

People in the land of LaLa look like expensive wax fruit. And they work hard to achieve that look.

I think politicians sometimes badly underestimate the true feelings that Americans have for the land.

I grew up in northern Minnesota on 40 acres of wooded land 20 miles from the nearest town, and so the wilderness was home. It was not an unsafe place. I had that advantage. But there are so many representations of the wilderness being dangerous. You know, depictions of wild animals attacking people. It's like, "No, we kill those animals in far greater numbers than they kill us."

Stop invading Muslims lands! How can you expect Muslims to love you when you are forcefully occupying their lands and murdering their people?