— Our National Parks , 1901, page 56.

Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature’s darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature’s sources never fail. -John Muir

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), page 256. John Muir

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) chapter 7

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
– John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 313.

Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.
– Muir’s marginal note in volume I of Prose Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fresh beauty opens one’s eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common everyday beauty.
– The Mountains of California (1894) chapter 15.

All quotes are from: http://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/favorite_quotations.aspx

 

All photos are from: a wanderer.