Frasi di John Muir

John Muir è stato un ingegnere, naturalista e scrittore scozzese naturalizzato statunitense ed uno dei primi conservazionisti moderni.

Le sue lettere e i suoi libri ci raccontano delle avventure nella natura, soprattutto illustrano la natura selvaggia delle montagne della Sierra Nevada in California; questi libri furono letti da milioni di lettori e sono popolari a tutt'oggi. Il suo diretto attivismo aiutò a preservare la Valle dello Yosemite e altre aree selvagge. Il Sierra Club, da lui fondato, è ora considerato una delle più importanti organizzazioni per la conservazione della natura negli Stati Uniti. I suoi scritti e la sua filosofia influenzarono fortemente la formazione della moderna scienza ambientale. Wikipedia  

✵ 21. Aprile 1838 – 24. Dicembre 1914
John Muir photo

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John Muir: 194   frasi 12   Mi piace

John Muir frasi celebri

“La Natura, a quanto pare, va fino in fondo, e vince sui cani come sugli uomini, facendoci fare quello che vuole, spingendoci e trascinandoci lungo le sue strade, per quanto impervie, a volte quasi uccidendoci per riuscire a farci portare a casa le sue lezioni.”

Origine: da "Stickeen. Storia di un cane", traduzione e cura di Saverio Bafaro e Massimo D'Arcangelo, La Vita Felice, Milano, 2022, p. 55. ISBN 9788893465243

John Muir Frasi e Citazioni

John Muir: Frasi in inglese

“In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.”

"Mormon Lilies", San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin (part 4 of the 4 part series "Notes from Utah") dated July 1877, published 19 July 1877; reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 9
1870s

“And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.”

Once again, this is far from Muir's style of writing. The quote does not come up in any search of John Muir's Journals or his published texts on the John Muir Exhibit website. It is most commonly put on t-shirts - never in any scholarly source.
Misattributed

“The world's big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.”

attributed to Muir by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (1945), page 331
1910s

“The power of imagination makes us infinite.”

1 September 1875, page 226
John of the Mountains, 1938
Contesto: How infinitely superior to our physical senses are those of the mind! The spiritual eye sees not only rivers of water but of air. It sees the crystals of the rock in rapid sympathetic motion, giving enthusiastic obedience to the sun's rays, then sinking back to rest in the night. The whole world is in motion to the center. So also sounds. We hear only woodpeckers and squirrels and the rush of turbulent streams. But imagination gives us the sweet music of tiniest insect wings, enables us to hear, all round the world, the vibration of every needle, the waving of every bole and branch, the sound of stars in circulation like particles in the blood. The Sierra canyons are full of avalanche debris — we hear them boom again, for we read past sounds from present conditions. Again we hear the earthquake rock-falls. Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the unreal. Yet is true imagination healthful and real, no more likely to mislead than the coarser senses. Indeed, the power of imagination makes us infinite.

“I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!”

July 1890, page 313
(From Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, Second Series (1844) "Essay VI: Nature": "the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.")
John of the Mountains, 1938
Contesto: It has been said that trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment rooted in the ground. But they never seem so to me. I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

“Living artificially in towns, we are sickly, and never come to know ourselves.”

" Explorations in the Great Tuolumne Cañon http://books.google.com/books?id=ZikGAQAAIAAJ&pg=P139", Overland Monthly, volume XI, number 2 (August 1873) pages 139-147 (at page 146); modified and reprinted in John of the Mountains (1938), page 77
1870s

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

July 1890, page 313
John of the Mountains, 1938

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”

These are paraphrases of Muir's quote from My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) - the actual quote is listed above: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." See Sierra Club explanation http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/misquotes.aspx.
Misattributed
Variante: Tug on anything at all and you'll find it connected to everything else in the universe.
Variante: When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world.

“The mountains are calling and I must go.”

letter to sister Sarah Muir Galloway (3 September 1873); published in William Federic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 10: Yosemite and Beyond
1870s

“Going to the mountains is going home.”

"In the Sierra Forests", San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin (part 3 of the 11 part series "Summering in the Sierra") dated July 1875, published 3 August 1875; reprinted in John Muir: Summering in the Sierra, edited by Robert Engberg (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) page 79
1870s
Variante: Going to the woods is going home.

“Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.”

Muir's marginal note in volume I of Prose Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson (This volume is located at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. See Albert Saijo, "Me, Muir, and Sierra Nevada", in Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California, edited by Peter Berg, San Francisco, California: Planet Drum Foundation, 1978, pages 52-59, at page 55, and Frederick W. Turner, Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours (1985), page 193.)
1870s

“This time it is real — all must die, and where could mountaineer find a more glorious death!”

John Muir libro My First Summer in the Sierra

Reprinted in The Wild Muir ISBN 0-939666-75-8 page 38, and Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 234
Origine: 1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”

The Yosemite http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_yosemite/ (1912), chapter 15: Hetch Hetchy Valley
1910s
Variante: Everybody needs beauty... places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul alike.

“God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. Even so, God cannot save them from fools.”

Variante: God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fool
Origine: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 10: The American Forests <!-- Terry Gifford, EWDB, pages 604-605 -->
Contesto: Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed — chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. … It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods — trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries … God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools — only Uncle Sam can do that.

“The world, we are told, was made especially for man — a presumption not supported by all the facts.”

John Muir libro A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf

Origine: A Thousand-Mile Walk To the Gulf, 1916, chapter 6: Cedar Keys, page 160
Origine: A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf

“I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

page 439
Last line of the documentary film " John Muir in the New World http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/john-muir-in-the-new-world/watch-the-full-documentary-film/1823/" (American Masters), produced, directed, and written by Catherine Tatge.
John of the Mountains, 1938
Origine: John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

“We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.”

John Muir libro My First Summer in the Sierra

Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 195
Origine: 1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

“John Muir, Earth — planet, Universe niel and I”

Muir's home address, as inscribed on the inside front cover of his first field journal http://digitalcollections.pacific.edu/cdm/ref/collection/muirjournals/id/115/show/3, which started 1 July 1867
1860s

“Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.”

I searched for keywords of that text in his books online and on an electronic copy of Muir of the Mountains, and was unable to find it. On rare occasions we find something in Muir's unpublished journals that is new and which can be verified. So I also did a search of the John Muir Papers at the University of the Pacific, and once again came up empty:
Misattributed

“Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.”

John Muir libro My First Summer in the Sierra

Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 253
Origine: 1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

John Muir libro Our National Parks

The Cruise of the Corwin http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/cruise_of_the_corwin/default.aspx (1917), chapter 3: Siberian Adventures <!-- Terry Gifford, LLO, page 738 -->
(Echoing William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, iii, 3: "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.")
1910s
Variante: One touch of nature makes all the world kin.
Origine: Our National Parks

“How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!”

Origine: 1890s, The Mountains of California (1894), chapter 4: A Near View of the High Sierra

“There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.”

Origine: A Thousand-Mile Walk To the Gulf, 1916, chapter 7: A Sojourn in Cubapage 168, omits the "all". This is a typo: see 1916 edition page 164
Origine: The Wilderness World of John Muir

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