Cellulose is the most widespread biopolymer on earth. In biosynthesis, cellulose polymers aggregate to form substructures, microfibrils, which in turn aggregate to form cellulose fibers. By applying effective methods these fibers can be disintegrated into cellulose substructures with micro- or nano-size dimensions. This article covers some aspects related to the sources of cellulose micro- and nanofibers and the most important methods for their isolation. One of these methods, acid hydrolysis, was experimentally used to obtain cellulose nano-fibers. Increasing the hydrolysis time and keeping other processing parameters constant, two types of cellulose fibers were obtained. They were studied by dynamic light scattering (DLS) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) and were used as reinforcements in a polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) matrix. The mechanical properties of the resulted composites were significantly influenced by the morphological features of these fibers.