Inspirational Quote Favorites: John Muir

You know that at Postconsumers we love inspirational quotes. In fact, we have an entire section devoted to quotes that inspire you to find satisfaction, love the planet and reject the consumer machine. This month, we’re highlighting quotes from two of our personal inspirations. Today’s quotes are from naturalist, author and preservationist John Muir.

Born in 1838, John Muir was a key force in the preservation efforts for Yosemite Valley and the Sequoia National Forest, both in California where Muir made his home. He also founded the Sierra Club, which is still one of the most important national organizations fighting for wildlife and wilderness preservation and conservation. You’ll find his name on monuments of nature throughout the United States, including Muir Woods and Muir Beach in northern California. Muir was also one of the driving forces behind convincing the government to pass the all-important National Parks bill in 1890, which established the nation’s now inviolable national parks system. His eloquence in writing about the importance of nature was an effective tool for him during his lifetime, and today we’re highlighting what we find to be his most inspirational quotes. We hope they move you as much as they moved us.

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike. “ The Yosemite (1912)

“Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” Muir quoted by Samuel Hall Young in Alaska Days with John Muir (1915)

“God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.” The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West, The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 81, Issue 483, January 1898.

“When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty. “ Travels in Alaska (1915)

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. “ John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938)

“I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found.” John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938)

“In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world – the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware. “ John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938)

“Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed — chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. … It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods — trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries … God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools — only Uncle Sam can do that.” Our National Parks (1901)

“Most people are on the world, not in it — have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them — undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.” John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938)

“Pollution, defilement, squalor are words that never would have been created had man lived conformably to Nature. Birds, insects, bears die as cleanly and are disposed of as beautifully as flies. The woods are full of dead and dying trees, yet needed for their beauty to complete the beauty of the living…. How beautiful is all Death! “ John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938)

“The snow is melting into music. “ John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir (1938)

“If one pine were placed in a town square, what admiration it would excite! Yet who is conscious of the pine-tree multitudes in the free woods, though open to everybody?” John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938)

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.” Our National Parks, (1901)

“Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done and suffered by her creatures. All scars she heals, whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts. “ John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938)

“I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. “ John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938)

Did we miss a John Muir quote that you love and want to share with us? If so, just tell us about it on one of the social media channels below.