Quotations and Meditations of John Muir

  • Favorite Quotations: Selected by Harold Wood
  • John Muir Misquoted: There are an increasing number of misquotes attributed to John Muir widely circulated on the Internet and even in published books. Learn how to tell the difference.
  • Select Passages by John Muir
  • John Muir's Stance Against Anthropocentrism: Muir's thoughts compiled by Bron Taylor
  • Man's Place in the Universe, originally published in Muir's A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916)
  • Mountain Thoughts: Written by John Muir during the 1870s, collected by Linnie Marsh Wolfe in John of the Mountains (1938).
  • A Parable of Sauntering by Albert W. Palmer: Including a conversation with John Muir showing how Muir hated "hiking" - both the word and the thing. (excerpted from The Mountain Trail and Its Message, 1911) .
  • Muir Quotes on Death: Through his many wilderness adventures, Muir had experiences around death which led him to an inner peace with death that is rare today. 
  • Wild Wool by John Muir (1875): Muir's argument that he has "never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself," using wild vs. domestic sheep as a primary example.