John Muir Quotes

From out of all the many particulars comes oneness, and out of oneness come all the many particulars.

I am two with nature.

The whole soul is in the whole body, in the bones and in the veins and in the heart; it is no more present in one part than in another, and it is no less present in one part than in the whole, nor in the whole less than in one part.

Nature does not compartmentalise. Its instinct is integrative and holistic.

My life is a mosaic, and there's no room in between pieces at all.

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.

You are a piece of creation. If you go against any other piece of creation, you are unknowingly going against yourself.

One's not half two. It's two are halves of one.

You are the world and the world is you.

Clouds, torsos, shells, peppers, trees, rocks, smoke stacks, are but interdependent, interrelated parts of a whole, which is life.

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.

You're not a wave, you're a part of the ocean.

The seed of everything is in everything else.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.

Whoever dedicates his life to searching out particular connections of nature will spontaneously be confronted with the question how they harmoniously fit into the whole.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

You must stop seeing God as separate from you, and you as separate from each other. [...] Nothing exists in the universe that is separate from anything else. Everything is intrinsically connected, irrevocably interdependent, interactive, interwoven into the fabric of all of life.

Do not focus too much on the east and forget the west. And do not ignore the south, to speak for the north. What happens in the east has effects in the north, as the west has in the south. And do not focus on one species and ignore the other. Or love your father but ignore your mother, or love your sister but ignore your brother. Do not forget each other. We are all part of each other. We are all ONE.

you can't really separate modernity from history or spiritual concerns from mundane ones. Everything feeds into everything else.

To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.

But if you do know what is taught by plants and weather, you are in on the gossip and can feel truly at home. The sum of a field's forces [become] what we call very loosely the 'spirit of the place.' To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made or parts, each of which in a whole. You start with the part you are whole in.

When the whole and the parts are seen at once, as mutually producing and explaining each other, as unity in multeity, there results shapeliness.

Still follow sense, of ev'ry art the soul, Parts answering parts shall slide into a whole.