Without the name, any flower is still more or less a stranger to you. The name betrays its family, its relationship to other flowers, and gives the mind something tangible to grasp. It is very difficult for persons who have had no special training to learn the names of the flowers from the botany.
JOHN BURROUGHSNature teaches more than she preaches.
More John Burroughs Quotes
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The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The secret of happiness is something to do.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
I 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.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain that it is positively bad.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Not so the oven-bird, or the other birds that walk, as the cow-bunting, or the quail, or the crow. They move the head forward with the movement of the feet.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The city, a place to which one goes to do business, is a place where men overreach each other in the fight for money. But it is not a place in which one can live.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Summer is more wooing and seductive, more versatile and human, appeals to the affections and the sentiments, and fosters inquiry and the art impulse.
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 -
It seems at times as if they possessed some extra sense – the home sense – which operates unerringly.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The key is always to speak in your own voice. Speak the truth. That’s Acting 101. Then you start putting layers on top of that.
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 -
The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds.
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






