Nearly every season, I make the acquaintance of one or more new flowers. It takes years to exhaust the botanical treasures of any one considerable neighborhood, unless one makes a dead set at it, like an herbalist.
JOHN BURROUGHSOne reason, doubtless, why squirrels are so bold and reckless in leaping through the trees is that, if they miss their hold and fall, they sustain no injury.
More John Burroughs Quotes
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On the same principles, the ornithologist will direct you where to look for the greenlets, the wood-sparrow, or the chewink.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Nature furnishes the conditions – the solitude – and the soul furnishes the entertainment.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The love of nature is a different thing from the love of science, though the two may go together.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
He who marvels at the beauty of the world in summer will find equal cause for wonder and admiration in winter.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
It seems at times as if they possessed some extra sense – the home sense – which operates unerringly.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
To regard the soul and body as one, or to ascribe to consciousness a physiological origin, is not detracting from its divinity; it is rather conferring divinity upon the body.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The feminine character, the feminine perceptions, intuitions, delicacy, sympathy, quickness, are more responsive to natural forms and influences than is the masculine mind.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
No one else looks out upon the world so kindly and charitably as the pedestrian; no one else gives and takes so much from the country he passes through.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
To be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring – these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The Nature Lover is not looking for mere facts but for meanings, for something he can translate into terms of his own life.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
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.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
I have discovered the secret of happiness – it is work, either with the hands or the head.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
England is like the margin of a spring-run: near its source, always green, always cool, always moist, comparatively free from frost in winter and from drought in summer.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
We talk of communing with Nature, but ’tis with ourselves we commune.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The human body is a steed that goes freest and longest under a light rider, and the lightest of all riders is a cheerful heart.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The spirit of man can endure only so much and when it is broken only a miracle can mend it.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
He is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The art of the bird is to conceal its nest both as to position and as to material, but now and then it is betrayed into weaving into its structure showy and bizarre bits of this or that, which give its secret away and which seem to violate all the traditions of its kind.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
In winter, the stars seem to have rekindled their fires, the moon achieves a fuller triumph, and the heavens wear a look of a more exalted simplicity.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Living in the city is a discordant thing, an unnatural thing.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The distribution of plants in a given locality is not more marked and defined than that of the birds. Show a botanist a landscape, and he will tell you where to look for the lady’s-slipper, the columbine, or the harebell.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Like tens of thousands of others, I have been a spectator of, rather than a participator in, the activities – political, commercial, sociological, scientific – of the times in which I have lived.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
I am for 100 per cent Americanism, 100 per cent efficiency, and 100 per cent life. I expect to live to be 100 years old.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
There never was a happier or more devoted husband than the male bluebird. He is the gay champion and escort of the female at all times, and while she is sitting, he feeds her regularly.
JOHN BURROUGHS