The Writings of John Muir: The life and letters of John Muir |
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basin beauty botanical cabin California camp cañon Cedar Keys Chilwell Clarence King climbed clouds Daniel Muir Dome Douglas squirrel Dunbar Emerson Ezra farm father feet ferns flowers forests Fountain Lake Gilrye glacial Glacier Point glaciers glorious glory Gray groves Hetch Hetchy Hickory Hill hills Hutchings Joaquin John Muir Kings River leave LeConte live Madison Mariposa Grove meadow Merced Merced River miles month moraines morning moun Mount Whitney mountain Muir's Nature never night peaks pine plants Professor ramble reached River rocks Sarah Scotch seemed Sequoia sheep side Sierra Nevada sister sketch snow soon South storms stream summer summit tains tell Tenaya tion trees Tuolumne walk wall weeks wild wilderness winter Wiscon Wisconsin wish wonder woods write wrote Yosemite Creek Yosemite Falls Yosemite Valley
Popular passages
Page 77 - I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in...
Page 168 - Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit — the cosmos ? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.
Page 39 - Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and cinders so long thrashed into us. Here without knowing it we still were at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us. Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness!
Page 166 - The world, we are told, was made especially for man — a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God's universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.
Page 44 - Thus godlike sympathy grows and thrives and spreads far beyond the teachings of churches and schools, where too often the mean, blinding, loveless doctrine is taught that animals have neither mind nor soul, have no rights that we are bound to respect, and were made only for man, to be petted, spoiled, slaughtered, or enslaved.
Page 361 - 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.
Page 256 - Stop and get acquainted with your big brethren." But he was past his prime, and was now as a child in the hands of his affectionate but sadly civilized friends, who seemed as full of old-fashioned conformity as of bold intellectual independence. It was the afternoon of the day and the afternoon of his life, and his course was now westward down all the mountains into the sunset. The party...
Page 164 - On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Instead of the sympathy, the friendly union, of life and death so apparent .in Nature, we are taught that death is an accident, a deplorable punishment for the oldest sin, the arch-enemy of life, etc.
Page 259 - ... lively remembrance, are either unwritten or lost, so I will send this peccavi, as a sign of remorse. I have been far from unthankful — I have everywhere testified to my friends, who should also be yours, my happiness in finding you, the right man in the right place — in your mountain tabernacle, and have expected when your guardian angel would pronounce that your probation and sequestration in the solitudes and snows had reached their term, and you were to bring your ripe fruits so rare and...
Page 43 - The fearfully good, the orthodox, of this laborious patchwork of modern civilization cry "Heresy" on every one whose sympathies reach a single hair's breadth beyond the boundary epidermis of our own species. Not content with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only ones who possess the kind of souls for which that imponderable empire was planned.