It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.
JOHN BURROUGHSIt is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.
JOHN BURROUGHSFear, love, and hunger were the agents that developed the wits of the lower animals, as they were, of course, the prime factors in developing the intelligence of man.
JOHN BURROUGHSOn the same principles, the ornithologist will direct you where to look for the greenlets, the wood-sparrow, or the chewink.
JOHN BURROUGHSEmerson’s fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during his lifetime by the books he gave to the world.
JOHN BURROUGHSNearly 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 BURROUGHSThe love of nature is a different thing from the love of science, though the two may go together.
JOHN BURROUGHSI have discovered the secret of happiness – it is work, either with the hands or the head.
JOHN BURROUGHSWithout 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 BURROUGHSThe red squirrel is more common and less dignified than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty larceny about the barns and grain-fields.
JOHN BURROUGHSTo regard the soul and body as one, or to ascribe to consciousness a physiological origin, is not detracting from its divinity; it is rather conferring divinity upon the body.
JOHN BURROUGHSOne 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 BURROUGHSWhy, 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 BURROUGHSBirds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness.
JOHN BURROUGHSHow many thorns of human nature are bristling conceits, buds of promise grown sharp for want of congenial climate.
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 BURROUGHSThe Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.
JOHN BURROUGHS