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• Government protection should be thrown around every wild grove and forest on the mountains, as it is around every private orchard, and the trees in public parks.
  To say nothing of their value as fountains of timber, they are worth infinitely more than all the gardens and parks of towns....
• Going to the mountains is going home. -- John Muir, American Naturalist (1838-1914)
• The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil.
  The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains - mountain dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops....
• It was not like taking the veil. No solemn adjuration of the world.
  I only went out for a walk and finally decided to stay till sundown....
• Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness.
  All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter....
• Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated.
  It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common everyday beauty....
• When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
  -- My First Summer in the Sierra , 1911, page 110....
• In God's wildness lies the hope of the world x the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.
  The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware....
• Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life
  heir joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life....