John Muir Quotes

When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration.

Ralph Waldo Emerson would definitely be my homeboy.

Emerson was such an important figure in our literary history, and in the moral and religious development of our people, that attention cannot be directed to him too often.

Emerson's fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during his lifetime by the books he gave to the world.

I like the story about Henry David Thoreau, who, when he was on his death bed, his family sent for a minister. The minister said, 'Henry, have you made your peace with God?' Thoreau said, 'I didn't know we'd quarreled.'

My Mt. Rushmore of hero worship would include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Marcus Aurelius, Frank Sinatra and Barry White.

Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can't get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head.

Death Valley is really wide-open - it's bigger than Rhode Island - and it's less a part of California than an ungoverned territory, so there's lots of weird cops-and-robbers stuff going on.

Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.

I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.

I went to Concord, a young woman from the backwoods, firm in belief that Emerson was the first of living men. He was the modern Moses who had talked with God apart and could interpret Him to us.

When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson.

Transcendentalists like Emerson were searching for unity in nature, but resisted what seemed to them the blinkered reliance on deductive reasoning and empirical research enforced by encroaching science.

I spent a lot of time growing up in Oregon after I left California. Spent a lot of time in the woods.

Whitman was Emerson translated from the abstract into the concrete.

The day after my mom died I fly back to California and spend the three weeks before the California primary making arrangements for her cremation, planning and getting the house ready for a memorial service and covering political rallies in Southern California. The normalcy of work helps.

Asked whether or not he believed in an afterlife, Thoreau quipped, "One world at a time."

At the top of the mountain we are all snow leopards.

Mystery's a thing not easily captured, and once deceased, not easily exhumed.

I’ve been to the Mountaintop

I have often thought upon death, and I find it the least of all evils.

To die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird, seems to me very good fortune indeed.

I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.

For character, to prepare for the inevitable I recommend selections from [Ralph Waldo] Emerson. His writings have done for me far more than all other reading.

Real loss is only possible when you love something more than you love yourself.