And then there are quotes from John Muir which are taken out of context, which result in a meaning that is really very different from the point that John Muir was actually trying to make. Here's an example: " The mountains are calling and I must go, and I will work on while I can, studying incessantly." Letters of John Muir, Chapter 10 (1923).) This quote is often truncated, removing the last half, italicized here, as if going on vacation to visit a mere playground. But reading the full quote, Muir actually insisted that going to the mountains was only a first step. As Michael Wurtz points out in "What Muir Really Meant by 'the Mountains Are Calling' in Adventure Journal, August 13, 2018, "the shortened quote doesn't fully capture John Muir or his desire to understand and protect California's Yosemite." The reason to go was to study nature, and just as important, work to protect our wilderness areas. Elsewhere in the letter, Muir revealed that he was spending "the season in prosecuting my researches," and hoped to make a scientific contribution from his mountain studies, in winter to "work with my pen." Wurtz points out, "These words reveal a man who saw responsibility and purpose as well as pleasure in the mountains." This essay by Michael Wurtz was first published as How John Muir's Incessant Study Saved Yosemite in The Conversation in 2016. As writer Michael Seeger writes, "Perhaps we all would do well to work on studying nature while we can - and if we don't work to protect our lands, we may not have long to do so."]

In fact, there are an increasing number of misquotes attributed to John Muir widely circulated on the Internet and even in published books.Wiki Quotes reports a number of additional mis-attributed John Muir quotes. Please don't just repeat these mis-attributed quotes! In some cases, the misquotes are not merely misleading, but completely reverse Muir's meaning. According to Stephen Fox's book, John Muir and His Legacy (p. 291), this is the original version of the famous quote, which Muir wrote in his journal for July 27, 1869. Muir's journals can be found in the John Muir Papers 2 . Fox notes that Muir later revised the wordy sentence to read with the more pithy word " hitched" in his book My First Summer in the Sierra. The correct "Climb the mountains" quotation as published in "Our National Parks" should end in "off like autumn leaves," like this: In fact, there are many variants of the mysteriously popular "tugs" misquote, and none of them are correct.these variations on the "tugs" theme attributed to John Muir are correct. They are simply paraphrases Everything is so inseparably united. As soon as one begins to describe a flower or a tree or a storm or an Indian a chipmunk, up jumps the whole heavens and earth and God Himself in one inseparable glory! According to a November 4, 2018 communication from Mariah Danu, she wrote this last version in October of 2014 on Tumblr with her Mariah Danu account, but is aware that companies are taking her quote and attributing it wrongly to John Muir.

Muir's famous quote "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings..." is often misquoted as "climb the mountains and get their glad tidings." That kind of mistake is obvious, with its Christmas connotations. But there is also another misquote feauturing an alternative ending that has been around for decades. The earliest we have found with this misquote was published in 1911, in a magazine called "The Fra: A Journal of Affirmation, Volume 7. Given variant sources and multiple versions of Muir's writings, it is not surprising to find that Muir actually did originally express the same idea in the famous "hitched" quote in a different way. As originally written, he was nonetheless as eloquent as always, although rather more wordy: Although this quote can be found nowhere in Muir's writing, one recent source even brazenly attributed this misquote to a specific date in John Muir's journal - July 27, 1869 - but a careful examination of the original of the entry for that date reveals nothing approximating it whatsoever. It is a shame the publishers of all these textbooks, books and purportedly scholarly articles did not not correctly verify the quote!Worse, we even found it engraved on granite, and posted on signs at places like zoos and botanical gardens.