John Muir Quotes

My favourite country is Finland because once you get to a certain point, you can drive for hours without seeing a single person. I love peace and quiet - something I don't get very often.

My desk faces the water, and I'm perfectly happy sitting there. I'm never lonely.

The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.

Poets knew that isolation in nature, far from people and things man-made, was good for the soul, and he'd always identified with poets.

I also like a lot of silence, and when you're touring, it's constantly noise, all the time, you're surrounded with 15 or 20 people the entire time. I find that tough.

I would rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.

To be exempt from the Passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing Solitude.

Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.

Today, I am blessed to be living a dream. And yet, if it all went away tomorrow, I know I would still have peace.

Solitude has its own very strange beauty to it.

I feel calm when I'm on my own.

I found that quiet place in my home that is my place of refuge. I don't care if you got kids or if you are married. You got to find that one place that is your everybody-off-limit place: unless this place is on fire, or you need to go to the emergency room, don't disturb me. You can go to this place and cleanse, meditate, let God speak to you.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be.

I would head to the countryside for peace and silence. That would be the best way, away from panicked, hysterical people.

Once in a while, the universe lets you be free alone and in peace.

I love the forest. It is the place where you hear yourself better.

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.

I spend most of my time alone, because I so value and thrive in the quiet. Heaven.

Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.

I have lately got back to that glorious society called Solitude.

But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again.

Here silence stands Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

The worse I get along with people the more I learn to have faith in Nature and concentrate on her.