The life of a swarm of bees is like an active and hazardous campaign of an army: the ranks are being continually depleted and continually recruited.
JOHN BURROUGHSI am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.
More John Burroughs Quotes
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One of the most graceful of warriors is the robin. I know few prettier sights than two males challenging and curveting about each other upon the grass in early spring. Their attentions to each other are so courteous and restrained.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
How many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday-lives, and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!
JOHN BURROUGHS -
There is a great deal of speculation in the eye of an animal, but very little science.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice – no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
If America wishes to preserve her native birds, we must help supply what civilization has taken from them.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Nothing. The Infinite knows no time, no space, no great, no small, no beginning, no end.
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 -
We talk of communing with Nature, but ’tis with ourselves we commune.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Some men are like nails, very easily drawn; others however are more like rivets never drawn at all.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Where country life is safe and enjoyable, where many of the conveniences and appliances of the town are joined to the large freedom and large benefits of the country, a high state of civilization prevails.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Why, we have invented the whole machinery of the supernatural, with its unseen spirits and powers, good and bad, to account for things, because we found the universal everyday nature too cheap, too common, too vulgar.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
To me, nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which it grows and lives.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
I find that something one gets from Emerson in early life does not leave him when he grows old.
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 -
Father knew me not. All my aspirations in life were a sealed book to him, as much as his peculiar religious experiences were to me.
JOHN BURROUGHS