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 BURROUGHSThe human body is a steed that goes freest and longest under a light rider, and the lightest of all riders is a cheerful heart.
More John Burroughs Quotes
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A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did.
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 -
My motto is never to try to imitate anybody: I have always looked inward and followed the inward voice.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness.
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 -
You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Most birds are very stiff-necked, like the robin, and as they run or hop upon the ground, carry the head as if it were riveted to the body.
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 -
He who marvels at the beauty of the world in summer will find equal cause for wonder and admiration in winter.
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 -
A man can get discouraged many times but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
How many thorns of human nature are bristling conceits, buds of promise grown sharp for want of congenial climate.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
When Darwin published his conclusion that man was descended from an apelike ancestor who was again descended from a still lower type.
JOHN BURROUGHS