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Quotes of the Day for 21 April 2005 - John Muir

John Muir was born at Dunbar, Scotland on this day in 1838. His family emigrated to the US in 1849 and he graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1863. In 1867 he set out on foot from Indiana and reached the Gulf of Mexico, then settled in California where he took an interest in Yosemite Valley. Approaching his subject with the tools of science and the heart of a poet, he campaigned to create the first national park there. Along the way he founded the Sierra Club and wrote numerous books, all of which remain in print to this day.

Keep close to Nature's heart ... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

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.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, and of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains.

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere: the dew is never all dried at once: a shower is forever falling, vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
     - All from John Muir, 1838 - 1914

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