John Muir Quotes

I think I had a particular moment when I was 15 years old. I read 'Crime and Punishment,' and that book just, I think, more than any other book made me want to be a writer, 'cause it was the first time that I hadn't just entered a book, but a book had entered me.

When it's good, cinema can be one of the most important things in a person's life. A film can be a catalyst for change. You witness this and it is an incredibly spiritual experience that I'd never lived before; well, maybe only in a football match.

'Yogi Bear' changed my life in ways that I can't explain because it's not a full feature on me. 'Yogi Bear' - there's everything before 'Yogi Bear,' and there's everything after 'Yogi Bear.' Like a major car accident, or the birth of Christ.

The music began, and it was one of those life-changing moments. I saw an artist, Janis Joplin. She was exhilarating. She was vibrating. And she was like no other artist that I had ever seen before... It struck me that hard. Maybe the word is epiphany, when you get that special sensation.

Nature is impersonal, awe-inspiring, elegant, eternal. It's geometrically perfect. It's tiny and gigantic. You can travel far to be in a beautiful natural setting, or you can observe it in your backyard - or, in my case, in the trees lining New York City sidewalks, or in the clouds above skyscrapers.

I had a mystical experience when I was in my late teens, early 20s, and I spent years trying to recapture that.

The scriptures record remarkable accounts of men whose lives changed dramatically, in an instant, as it were: Alma the Younger, Paul on the road to Damascus, Enos praying far into the night, King Lamoni.

You're put in certain situations and it kind of opens up those doors and it opens up your eyes to realize what your true calling was.

I'd just come through cancer in 1995. Which really changed my soul. It really did. It changed me... It made my faith alive - and real. God's real.

That's the magic of art and the magic of theatre: it has the power to transform an audience, an individual, or en masse, to transform them and give them an epiphanal experience that changes their life, opens their hearts and their minds and the way they think.

Sometimes I go back and listen to the very first day I went to church. I listen to that sermon all the time, because that was the sermon that was life changing for me.

That experience of being at Mt. St. Helen's was really formative. I don't even know if I'd be a photographer. It was an essential moment for me.

I had never seen an ocean before I came to Mumbai, something that now we take for granted. But the first time I stood in front of the ocean, it affected me for a week. I had never seen something as enormous. It consumed me completely.

Hawaii was so integral to my journey. I was just there at the right time.

'Ray of Light' changed my life. The whole album, but that song specifically, was just so life-changing and incredible for me.

I was really aware, even while it was happening, that the discovery of arts education in my life sort of saved my life.

Once, I played a doctor who had a near-death experience, so I researched it, and it's impressive what people are saying about what happened to those who've been through it: it changed their lives completely, made them different people after that. I find that immensely comforting.

'Moonlight' has changed my life externally but also internally... spiritually as well.

The leaves had fallen from the trees and lay crisp and crackling beneath his feet. Picking one up he marveled, not for the first time, at the perfection of nature where leaves were most beautiful at the very end of their lives.

When I was about fifteen, I went to work at Yosemite National Park. It changed me forever. Nature had carved its own sculpture, and I was part of it, not the other way around.

Filming in Africa touched something really deep inside of me, really. It changed my matrix, my insides. My blood even feels kinda different. I don't know how to describe it. It's really kind of Eucharistic. I feel like I ate the place and now it's part of my system, part of my being. I'm not claiming that now I know what it's like to be African, but that now I have a deeper understanding of myself.

Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opens a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space...All that negative stuff. All the pain...It just floted away from me, I just floated away from it...up and away.

I feel the delightful, velvety texture of a flower, and discover its remarkable convolutions; and something of the miracle of Nature is revealed to me.

Dawn rose from the desert and turned the river to wine.

That defining moment at my friend's house, when his uncle looks in my eye and reads me the word of God, I have an awakening.