John Muir Quotes

There are myriads of forms and hundreds of grasses throughout the entire earth, yet each grass and each form itself is the entire earth.

A man is related to all nature.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow-mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go.

I am two with nature.

I love to think that animals and humans and plants and fishes and trees and stars and the moon are all connected.

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.

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.

Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.

Are not the mountains, waves, and skies as much a part of me, as I of them?

Child and serpent, star and stone — all one.

Yes, I am going into the woods; I am going into the unity of all things.

He who regards all things as one is a companion of Nature.

Family, nature and health all go together.

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

The seed of everything is in everything else.

To drop into being means to recognize your interconnectedness with all life, and with being itself. Your very nature is being part of larger and larger spheres of wholeness.

Everything is together—spiritual and political.

There isn't a line that you can draw between the air and your body. We are the environment.

I try not to think of my life in terms of separation.

It is funny how we talk about nature as this separate entity when we are nature, and nature is us.

I don't believe in the separation between mankind and nature. Mankind is nature.

I can't be separated from nature. I am one of her faces.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

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.

For nature then to me was all in all.