20 Inspiring Mountain Quotes from Adventurer John Muir
Have you been spending lots of time outdoors lately? If you’ve lost your connection to the outdoors, you might appreciate a few reminders of the beauty and magic of it all from naturalist, poet, writer, and explorer John Muir. Muir was an early advocate of the preservation of wilderness.
John Muir was a famous adventurer who was writing about mountains over 100 years ago. He spent years in the High Sierra Nevada and Alaska. He reminds us now, that we loose our desire for wanting to feel alive by working too much and being too focused on making money rather than experiencing life and things that bring us joy.
In California, he is celebrated every year on April 21. April 21 is John Muir Day. There are three mountains named in his honour as well as a glacier, a mountain pass, numerous trails, wilderness areas, beaches, a highway and even a high altitude climbing camp on Mount Rainier.
John was instrumental in establishing Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks and he was the founder of the Sierra Club.
Here are some of his very memorable, and inspiring, quotes.
Our Favourite Quotes by John Muir
1. “Most people are on the world, not in it. ”
2. “Who wouldn’t be a mountaineer! Up here all the world’s prizes seem nothing.”
3. “Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action.”
4. “The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.”
5. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
6. “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”
7. “In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks.”
8. “This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”
9. “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”
10. “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”
11. “I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”
12. “One day’s exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books.”
13. “Most people who travel look only at what they are directed to look at. Great is the power of the guidebook maker, however ignorant.”
14. “I never saw a discontented tree.”
15. “None of Nature’s landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.”
16. “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
17. “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.”
18. “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.”
19. “The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains – mountain dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature’s workshops.”
20. “Going to the mountains is going home.”
Which quote is your favourite?
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