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.
JOHN BURROUGHSWriting 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.
JOHN BURROUGHSI crave and seek a natural explanation of all phenomena upon this earth, but the word ‘natural’ to me implies more than mere chemistry and physics.
JOHN BURROUGHSFor 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 BURROUGHSI went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth.
JOHN BURROUGHSIt is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp winter air is full of it.
JOHN BURROUGHSThe very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
JOHN BURROUGHSOur 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 BURROUGHSNature furnishes the conditions – the solitude – and the soul furnishes the entertainment.
JOHN BURROUGHSI have thought that a good test of civilization, perhaps one of the best, is country life.
JOHN BURROUGHSIf you think you can do it, you can.
JOHN BURROUGHSNaturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
JOHN BURROUGHSIn 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 BURROUGHSA man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
JOHN BURROUGHSThe lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.
JOHN BURROUGHSTo still others, who again have their human prototypes, it means a struggle, more or less fierce, to keep soul and body together; while to many insect forms, it means death.
JOHN BURROUGHSUnadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
JOHN BURROUGHS