John Muir Quotes

Trees are great. Don't get me started about how clever they are, how oxygen-generous, how time-formed in inner cyclic circles, how they provide homes for myriad creatures, how - back when this country was covered in forests - the word for sky was an Old English word that meant 'tops of trees.'

Trees love to toss and sway; they make such happy noises.

Vegetation is the basic instrument the creator uses to set all of nature in motion.

Woods are rich with biodiversity and, above all, places of trees and light that spangles a thousand greens through the leaves.

Trees are our closest relatives. What trees exhale, we inhale; what we exhale, they inhale. They are half our respiratory system.

Trees are complicated, fascinating things, usually older and more beautiful than any of us.

I adore water, so it would be a real adventure to visit the Amazon before they chop down all the trees.

Think about a seed. Once it lands, it's stuck. It can't move to find better soil, moisture or sunlight. It's able to create every part of itself to grow and reproduce with the help of air, water and sun.

The earth has received the embrace of the sun and we shall see the results of that love.

Life is a force in its own right. It is a new element. And it has altered the Earth. It covers Earth like a skin.

The tree that is beside the running water is fresher and gives more fruit.

Any person, brought into the presence of this fact, stops for a few moments and remains pensive and silent; and then generally leaves, carrying with him forever a sharper, keener sense of our incessant motion through space.

I consider nature a vast chemical laboratory in which all kinds of composition and decompositions are formed.

Earth is a flower and it's pollinating.

A tree you pass by every day is just a tree. If you are to closely examine what a tree has and the life a tree has, even the smallest thing can withstand a curiosity, and you can examine whole worlds.

Ultimately, the only wealth that can sustain any community, economy or nation is derived from the photosynthetic process - green plants growing on regenerating soil.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I but when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by.

I've always liked trees. And then, growing up, I took an interest in ecology, hedges being destroyed, the landscape being turned into prairies.

I can feel the wind go by when I run. It feels good. It feels fast.

The environment is everything that isn't me.

A tree is beautiful, but what’s more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees. Forests create climate, climate influences peoples’ character, and so on and so forth. There can be neither civilization nor happiness if forests crash down under the axe, if the climate is harsh and severe, if people are also harsh and severe. ... What a terrible future!

…trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the Sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree. And in the ash is the small remnant of the part which did not come from air, that came from the solid earth, instead.

What really made me think about space and begin to think about ways to use it was Einstein's statement that there are no fixed points in space. Everything in the universe is moving all the time.

One of the best ways to see tree flowers is to climb one of the tallest trees and to get into close, tingling touch with them, and then look broad.