I have thought that a good test of civilization, perhaps one of the best, is country life.
JOHN BURROUGHSIf one gains an interest in the history of the earth, he is quite sure to gain an interest in the history of the life on the earth. If the former illustrates the theory of development, so must the latter.
More John Burroughs Quotes
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It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
More than any other poet, Whitman is what we make him; more than any other poet, his greatest value is in what he suggests and implies rather than in what he portrays, and more than any other poet must he wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of himself.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The birth of a baby and the blooming of a flower are natural events, but the laboratory methods forever fail to give us the key to the secret of either.
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 -
To many forms of life of our northern lands, winter means a long sleep; to others, it means what it means to many fortunate human beings – travels in warm climes.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The moment I have something to do, the draughts are open and my chimney draws, and I am happy.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think.
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 -
As with other phases of nature, I have probably loved the rocks more than I have studied them.
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 -
We talk of communing with Nature, but ’tis with ourselves we commune.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Every species of tree-squirrel seems to be capable of a sort of rudimentary flying, at least of making itself into a parachute, so as to ease or break a fall or a leap from a great height.
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 -
Even in rugged Scotland, nature is scarcely wilder than a mountain sheep, certainly a good way short of the ferity of the moose and caribou.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Secluded waters of some pool or lakelet, are the crown and summit of the floral expeditions of summer.
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 -
How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Nature teaches more than she preaches.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
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.
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 -
Some men are like nails, very easily drawn; others however are more like rivets never drawn at all.
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 -
Man has climbed up from some lower animal form, but he has, as it were, pulled the ladder up after him.
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 -
There is a great deal of speculation in the eye of an animal, but very little science.
JOHN BURROUGHS