Robin is one of the most native and democratic of our birds; he is one of the family, and seems much nearer to us than those rare, exotic visitants, as the orchard starling or rose-breasted grossbeak, with their distant, high-bred ways.
JOHN BURROUGHSIf I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature. And the greatest of these, at least the most constant and always at hand, is nature.
More John Burroughs Quotes
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I went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth.
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Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all – that has been my religion.
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We are beginning to see that money, after all, is not the main thing. The real values cannot be bought and sold.
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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.
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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.
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Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.
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A sap run is the sweet goodbye of winter. It is the fruit of the equal marriage of the sun and frost.
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Only man seems to be endowed with this faculty; he alone develops disinterested intelligence, intelligence that is not primarily concerned with his own safety and well-being but that looks abroad upon things.
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The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.
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Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness.
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To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter.
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Nature teaches more than she preaches.
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Some men are like nails, very easily drawn; others however are more like rivets never drawn at all.
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The Infinite cannot be measured. The plan of Nature is so immense, but she has no plan, no scheme, but to go on and on forever. What is size, what is time, distance, to the Infinite?
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We now use the word ‘nature’ very much as our fathers used the word ‘God.’
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It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life because it takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation.
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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.
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Some scenes you juggle two balls, some scenes you juggle three balls, some scenes you can juggle five balls.
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To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday.
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To me, nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which it grows and lives.
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All the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.
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The dog is often quick to resent a kick, be it from man or beast, but I have never known him to show anger at the door that slammed to and hit him. Probably, if the door held him by his tail or his limb, it would quickly receive the imprint of his teeth.
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Man has climbed up from some lower animal form, but he has, as it were, pulled the ladder up after him.
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England is not a country of granite and marble, but of chalk, marl, and clay.
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August is the month of the high-sailing hawks. The hen hawk is the most noticeable. He likes the haze and calm of these long, warm days. He is a bird of leisure and seems always at his ease. How beautiful and majestic are his movements!
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The love of nature is a different thing from the love of science, though the two may go together.
JOHN BURROUGHS