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 BURROUGHSScience has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
More John Burroughs Quotes
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How many thorns of human nature are bristling conceits, buds of promise grown sharp for want of congenial climate.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Nearly every season, I make the acquaintance of one or more new flowers. It takes years to exhaust the botanical treasures of any one considerable neighborhood, unless one makes a dead set at it, like an herbalist.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The fine, hair-like rootlets at the bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at the top.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
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.
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 -
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
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 -
Emerson’s fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during his lifetime by the books he gave to the world.
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 feminine character, the feminine perceptions, intuitions, delicacy, sympathy, quickness, are more responsive to natural forms and influences than is the masculine mind.
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 -
How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.
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 -
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






