John Muir Quotes

A man is related to all nature.

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

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

Child and serpent, star and stone — all one.

The seed of everything is in everything else.

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.

A birdsong can even, for a moment, make the whole world into a sky within us, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world's.

When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe ... The whole wilderness is unity and interrelation, is alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly.

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

There is no differentiation between all living things: trees, river, animals, and humans. We are all one interdependent organism, so our focus may seem broad but each element interacts with the other. We have so many phenomenal eyes, skills, and hands on deck. It's mind-blowingly exciting.

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

I am two with nature.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.

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.

It may be that to eat and be eaten are the same thing in the end. My wisdom tells me that this is probably so. We are all made of the same stuff, remember, we of the Jungle, you of the City. The same substance composes us-the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star-we are all one, all moving to the same end. Remember that when you no longer remember me, my child.

For nature then to me was all in all.

In nature there is a fundamental unity running through all the diversity we see about us. Religions are given to mankind so as to accelerate the process of realisation of fundamental unity.

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

.... we are a part of nature as a whole, whose order we follow.

The world is not divided into two types of being, one superior and the other merely surrounding it. Being, nature, the universe - they are all one infinitely complex and mysterious metaorganism of which we are but a part, though a unique one.

Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.

.... all blades of grass, wood, and stone, all things are One.