Browse 6 quotations connecting John Muir with Positive, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Sources represented here include Travels in Alaska, My First Summer in the Sierra, The Mountains of California.
“How interesting everything is!”
Wonder becomes a method of attention: rocks, streams, plants, and animals all become invitations to learn rather than background scenery.
My First Summer in the Sierra, near the close of the summer journal.
“This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.”
Muir describes freedom as absorption in immediate natural experience, where ordinary anxiety about saving time temporarily loses its force.
My First Summer in the Sierra, June 13; the sentence follows his reflection on not hurrying like the trees and stars.
“How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!”
The exclamation turns sunrise into an event worth deliberate attention, expressing Muir’s habit of treating ordinary natural processes as occasions for wonder.
The Mountains of California, in a passage describing morning light on the mountains.
“All the world seemed new-born.”
Intense attention can make familiar surroundings feel newly encountered, turning an ordinary moment into a renewed experience of landscape and life.
Travels in Alaska, mountain excursion near the Stickeen; Muir describes the effect of evening light after a strenuous day.
“The whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.”
A shift from isolated scenery to the whole globe enlarges beauty into a cosmic idea, connecting landscape observation with a sense of shared motion and scale.
Travels in Alaska, early sea voyage; Muir moves from ocean scenery to imagining the globe and stars together.
“Every thing, even the commonest, was seen in new light and was looked at with new interest as if never seen before.”
Attention changes the value of familiar things; novelty can come not from a new object but from seeing an ordinary one with renewed interest.
Travels in Alaska, same Stickeen excursion; the sentence follows Muir’s description of the world seeming newly born.
