My motto is never to try to imitate anybody: I have always looked inward and followed the inward voice.
JOHN BURROUGHSThe Nature Lover is not looking for mere facts but for meanings, for something he can translate into terms of his own life.
More John Burroughs Quotes
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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 -
Our flying squirrel is in no proper sense a flyer. On the ground, he is more helpless than a chipmunk, because less agile. He can only sail or slide down a steep incline from the top of one tree to the foot of another.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
A sap run is the sweet goodbye of winter. It is the fruit of the equal marriage of the sun and frost.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
I have discovered the secret of happiness. It is work.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The common bees will never use their sting upon the queen; if she is to be disposed of, they starve her to death, and the queen herself will sting nothing but royalty, nothing but a rival queen.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
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 BURROUGHS -
If 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.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds.
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 we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
When Darwin published his conclusion that man was descended from an apelike ancestor who was again descended from a still lower type.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
A man can get discouraged many times but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
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 BURROUGHS






