"Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean"

 Alaska Days with John Muir . Samuel Hall Young (1915)

"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness" 
John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938)

"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"
 Life and Letters of John Muir (1924)

"Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done and suffered by her creatures. All scars she heals, whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts"      "The snow is melting into music" 

John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938)

  "La felicidad de la abeja y del delfín es existir,

      la del ser humano es descubrir esto y maravillarse por ello"

                             "The hapiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist,

                                  for man it is to know that and wonder at it"

"Necesitamos otro concepto más sabio y quizás más místico sobre los animales. Alejado de la naturaleza univesal y viviendo en un complejo artificio, el hombre civilizado analiza a las criaturas a través de la lupa de su conocimiento, y es así como ve su pluma magnificada y toda la imagen en distorsión. Los tratamos con condescendencia por ser incompletos, por su trágico destino de haber adoptado una apariencia muy por debajo de la nuestra. Y es aquí donde erramos, erramos enormemente. Porque el animal no debe ser medido por el hombre. En un mundo más viejo y más completo que el nuestro, se mueven plenos y consumados, dotados de extensiones de los sentidos que ya hemos perdido o que jamás llegamos a poseer, viviendo a merced de voces que jamás oiremos. No son hermanos, no son vasayos, son otros mundos, atrapados junto a nosotros en la red de la vida y del tiempo, compañeros prisioneros del esplendor y del arduo trabajo de la tierra."

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” 

― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.  

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” 

― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space