Living in the city is a discordant thing, an unnatural thing.
JOHN BURROUGHSHow many thorns of human nature are bristling conceits, buds of promise grown sharp for want of congenial climate.
More John Burroughs Quotes
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When a herd of cattle see a strange object, they are not satisfied till each one has sniffed it; and the horse is cured of his fright at the robe, or the meal-bag, or other object, as soon as he can be induced to smell it.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The moment I have something to do, the draughts are open and my chimney draws, and I am happy.
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 -
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 -
Nature furnishes the conditions – the solitude – and the soul furnishes the entertainment.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
How many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday-lives, and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Man takes root at his feet, and at best, he is no more than a potted plant in his house or carriage till he has established communication with the soil by the loving and magnetic touch of his soles to it.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
He is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer.
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 -
Why, we have invented the whole machinery of the supernatural, with its unseen spirits and powers, good and bad, to account for things, because we found the universal everyday nature too cheap, too common, too vulgar.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Summer is more wooing and seductive, more versatile and human, appeals to the affections and the sentiments, and fosters inquiry and the art impulse.
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 -
I 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 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 -
Blessed is the man who has some congenial work, some occupation in which he can put his heart, and which affords a complete outlet to all the forces there are in him.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
I have discovered the secret of happiness. It is work.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Sometimes I am worried by the thought of the effect that life in the city will have on coming generations.
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 -
The red squirrel is more common and less dignified than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty larceny about the barns and grain-fields.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
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 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 -
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 -
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 -
We are beginning to see that money, after all, is not the main thing. The real values cannot be bought and sold.
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 -
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