John Muir Quotes

We are not talking about esthetics. We are talking about life: survival of Man. We must train young people to get another vision of Nature. We call it 'wilderness,' and we think it is progress to get further and further away from it. How crazy! Where would we have been if Nature had not built us up?

For the Earth is only an atom in the universe of worlds.

Teddy Roosevelt of course was a great outdoorsman all his life.

I think the Earth and everything around it is connected - the sky and the planets and the stars and everything else we see as a mystery.

Environmentalism is a way of seeing our place within the biosphere.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

I never wanted to be a scientist per se. I wanted to be a naturalist.

Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.

I've always liked Muir without knowing quite why.

I have never considered myself anything other than an environmentalist. I have spent the better part of my life either in the wilderness, or trying desperately to get there.

Ecosystems are holy. The word "environmental" is a deadly compromise itself. It's a policy word that lives only in the head, and barely there.

It's hard to talk about it without sounding like a hippie. But trees are really inspiring to me. They're like the masters of the earth.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Nature is simply the environment on earth in which man finds himself, and to treat it as a separate being in the image of man is sheer nonsense.

You see billions and billions of stars and recognize that you know some of those have planets, too, and maybe there's life out there, and this is just one of billions of galaxies... and so it gives you this huge perspective of how far we potentially have to go for real exploration.

If we don't have a planet, we don't have anything.

The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.

Human beings any one of us, and our species as a whole are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.

I think the environment is possibly our most worrying thing at the moment, so I think mountaintops are the place to live.

Man is slightly nearer to the atom than to the star. ... From his central position man can survey the grandest works of Nature with the astronomer, or the minutest works with the physicist. ... [K]nowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.

When the camera is looking back at our planet Earth, it's the tiniest of specks somewhere out there in the universe. So we do have a new sense of proportion. Of course the volcanoes and the magma under us just remind us of that.

As for myself, I do not believe in loggers, I believe in trees. I do not believe in fishermen, I believe in fish. I do not believe in miners, I believe in the rocks beneath my feet. I do not believe in pie in the sky spirituality, I believe in rainbows, rivers, mountains, and moss. I do not believe in environmentalists, I believe in the environment. I am a proud traitor to my species in alliance with my mother the Earth in opposition to those who would destroy her, those parasites who believe the Earth is here to serve human interests.

The forests are the lungs of the world. I’ve always believed if you breathe, you’re an environmentalist.

No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in a way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains as to wilderness, as that which declares that the world was made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.

The only way to build hope is throuhgh the Earth.