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 BURROUGHSBirds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness.
More John Burroughs Quotes
-
-
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 -
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 -
Life is a struggle, but not a warfare.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The homing instinct in birds and animals is one of their most remarkable traits: their strong local attachments and their skill in finding their way back when removed to a distance.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
As with other phases of nature, I have probably loved the rocks more than I have studied them.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
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.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Women are about the best lovers of nature, after all; at least of nature in her milder and more familiar forms.
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 -
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 -
Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country’s poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Some men are like nails, very easily drawn; others however are more like rivets never drawn at all.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
All birds are incipient or would-be songsters in the spring. I find corroborative evidence of this even in the crowing of the cock.
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 -
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 -
If 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.
JOHN BURROUGHS