John Muir Quotes

The web of life is a beautiful and meaningless dance. The web of life is a process with a moving goal. The web of life is a perfectly finished work of art right where I am sitting now.

Nature obliges everything to change about. One thing crumbles and falls in the weakness of age; Another grows in its place from a negligible start. So time alters the whole nature of the world And earth passes from one state to another.

I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time.

You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.

Everything in the world is conducted by gradual process. This seems to be the great principle of harmony in the universe.

Gardening is inevitably a process of constant, remorseless change. It is the constancy of that process that is so comforting, not any fixed moment.

You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born.

How lavish is Nature building, pulling down, creating, destroying, chasing every material particle from form to form, ever changing, ever beautiful.

The master does his job and then stops. He understands that the universe is forever out of control, and that trying to dominate events goes against the current of the Tao.

Nature makes nothing incomplete, and nothing in vain.

Nothing that is can pause or stay; / The moon will wax, the moon will wane, / The mist and cloud will turn to rain, / The rain to mist and cloud again, / Tomorrow be today.

Everything is born from change. ...there is nothing nature loves more that to alter what exists and make new things like it. All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it. You think the only seeds are the one that make plants and children? Go deeper.

The natural order will emerge only if we let go of the fear of the disorder, we trust each other.

Nature is beneficent. I praise her and all her works. She is silent and wise. She is cunning, but for good ends. She has brought me here and will also lead me away. She may scold me, but she will not hate her work. I trust her.

There is no better designer than nature

Temperance gives nature her full play, and enables her to exert herself in all her force and vigor.

All things are flowing, even those that seem immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe the materialswhich they want from the air and the ground. They burn, that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption. The earth burns, the mountains burn and decompose, slower, but incessantly.

Deviation from Nature is deviation from happiness.

Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done and suffered by her creatures. All scars she heals, whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts.

There is beauty to be found in the changing of the earth’s seasons, and an inner grace in honouring the cycles of life.

The Dance - it is the rhythm of all that dies in order to live again; it is the eternal rising of the sun.

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding

Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which you see, and out of their substance will make other things and again other things... in order that the world may be ever new.

To everything there is a season.

All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.