John Muir Quotes

My childhood was colorfully anarchic and punctuated by a lot of change.

I think frankly when it comes to chaos you ain't seen nothing yet.

It is not new and it is not order.

Nothing ever stays the same for very long in my life.

There's chaos out there, and chaos means opportunity.

Revolutions and their aftermaths, of course, are always fluid and fickle times, and the outcome is often perched on a knife's edge.

The world that we all knew before, could wake up in feeling safe... now it seems that everything has been turned upside down.

I frequently hear our present period described as uncertain, confused, chaotic.

My life has been a series of emergencies.

The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and establishment of the new constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism.

The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.

Turmoil stimulates.

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.

The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things.

This is chaos—organized chaos at best.

We are going through a terrible crisis. We do not know exactly what is going to happen, but in our hearts the pendulum of the seismograph is already swinging.

The only stable thing seems to be perpetual change, where our certainties are crumbling one after the other …

History goes out of control almost as often as nature does.

Politically, [Latin] America is the same as it is physically: the land of the earthquakes.

I unsettle all things.

Life is a series of dogs.

One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.

Of course it’s the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they’re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.

Revolution by its nature can not be overly programmed or directed. There are so many forces at work that you don't know where and how it all ends.

Whatever begins to be tranquil is gobbled up by something not tranquil.