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 BURROUGHSNot so the oven-bird, or the other birds that walk, as the cow-bunting, or the quail, or the crow. They move the head forward with the movement of the feet.
More John Burroughs Quotes
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I have discovered the secret of happiness – it is work, either with the hands or the head.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
One reason, doubtless, why squirrels are so bold and reckless in leaping through the trees is that, if they miss their hold and fall, they sustain no injury.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New England, and of English literature generally, as of another order.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The Infinite cannot be measured. The plan of Nature is so immense, but she has no plan, no scheme, but to go on and on forever. What is size, what is time, distance, to the Infinite?
JOHN BURROUGHS -
To 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 BURROUGHS -
To strong, susceptible characters, the music of nature is not confined to sweet sounds.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The life of a swarm of bees is like an active and hazardous campaign of an army: the ranks are being continually depleted and continually recruited.
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 -
Fear, 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 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 -
To me, nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which it grows and lives.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
No one else looks out upon the world so kindly and charitably as the pedestrian; no one else gives and takes so much from the country he passes through.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The spirit of man can endure only so much and when it is broken only a miracle can mend it.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Most people were shocked by the thought; it was intensely repugnant to their feelings.
JOHN BURROUGHS