John Muir Mountain Quotations

Of all the fire mountains which like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest.

As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but Nature's sources never fail. Like a generous host, she offers her brimming cups in endless variety, served in a grand hall, the sky its ceiling, the mountains its walls, decorated with glorious paintings and enlivened with bands of music ever playing.

Wherever we go in the mountains, we find more than we seek.

To myself, mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery; in them, and in the forms of inferior landscape that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up.

Who reports the works and ways of the clouds, those wondrous creations coming into being every day like freshly upheaved mountains?

What wonders lie in every mountain day!

Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God's mountains.

Galen Clark was the best mountaineer I ever met, and one of the kindest and most amiable of all my mountain friends.

Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains – beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.

Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer.

The mountains are fountains not only of rivers and fertile soil, but of men.

Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts . . .

Society speaks and all men listen, mountains speak and wise men listen

I’d rather be in the mountains thinking of God, than in church thinking about the mountains.

Doubly happy, however, is the man whom lofty mountain tops are within reach, for the lights that shine there illumine all that lies below