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 BURROUGHSThe red squirrel is more common and less dignified than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty larceny about the barns and grain-fields.
More John Burroughs Quotes
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The 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 BURROUGHS -
It seems at times as if they possessed some extra sense – the home sense – which operates unerringly.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
I find that something one gets from Emerson in early life does not leave him when he grows old.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The queen, I say, is the mother bee; it is undoubtedly complimenting her to call her a queen and invest her with regal authority, yet she is a superb creature and looks every inch a queen.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Emerson is the spokesman and prophet of youth and of a formative, idealistic age. His is a voice from the heights which are ever bathed in the sunshine of the spirit.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
There is something very human in this apparent mirth and mockery of the squirrels. It seems to be a sort of ironical laughter, and implies self-conscious pride and exultation in the laughter.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
If America wishes to preserve her native birds, we must help supply what civilization has taken from them.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Emerson was such an important figure in our literary history, and in the moral and religious development of our people, that attention cannot be directed to him too often.
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 -
Most young people find botany a dull study. So it is, as taught from the text-books in the schools; but study it yourself in the fields and woods, and you will find it a source of perennial delight.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Every species of tree-squirrel seems to be capable of a sort of rudimentary flying, at least of making itself into a parachute, so as to ease or break a fall or a leap from a great height.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
He who marvels at the beauty of the world in summer will find equal cause for wonder and admiration in winter.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The secret of happiness is something to do.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
He is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The animal world seizes its food in masses little and big, and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable, through the agency of the solvent power of water, absorbs its nourishment molecule by molecule.
JOHN BURROUGHS