I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay
out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness.
There is a love of wild nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties.
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as the sunshine into trees. The winds will blow their freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off you as autumn leaves.
In God's wildness lies the hope of the world--the great unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go. (My First Summer in the Sierra, July 27)
All things move in music and write it. The mouse, lizard, and grasshopper sing together on the Turlock sands, sing to the morning stars.
The horizon is bounded and adorned by a spiry wall of pines, every tree harmoniously related to every other; definite symbols, divine hieroglyphics written with the sunbeams. Would I could understand them! (My First Summer in the Sierra, June 6)
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. (My First Summer in the Sierra, July 27)
More and more, in a place like this, we feel ourselves a part of wild Nature, kin to everything. (My First Summer in the Sierra, September 2)
I am often asked if I am not lonely on my solitary excursions. It seems so self-evident that one cannot be lonesome where everything is wild and beautiful and busy and steeped with God that the question is hard to answer.
When I was a boy in Scotland, I was fond of everything that was wild. All my life I've been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures.
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.
I began to look forward with delight to the approaching winter with its wondrous storms, when I would be warmly snow-bound in my Yosemite cabin with plenty of bread and books.
Going to the woods is going home.
I have lived a bully life. I have done what I set out to do.
--John Muir (April 21, 1838 -- December 24, 1914)
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