Man has climbed up from some lower animal form, but he has, as it were, pulled the ladder up after him.
JOHN BURROUGHSThe lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.
More John Burroughs Quotes
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One 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 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 -
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 -
On the same principles, the ornithologist will direct you where to look for the greenlets, the wood-sparrow, or the chewink.
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 -
As with other phases of nature, I have probably loved the rocks more than I have studied them.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
One may summon his philosophy when they are beaten in battle, not till then.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.
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 -
I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.
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 -
I have suffered no great losses, or defeats, or illness, or accidents, and have undergone no great struggles or privations; I have had no grouch. I have not wanted the earth.
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 -
There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
We are really here to be happy and to make others happy.
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 -
Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life because it takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The distribution of plants in a given locality is not more marked and defined than that of the birds. Show a botanist a landscape, and he will tell you where to look for the lady’s-slipper, the columbine, or the harebell.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Living in the city is a discordant thing, an unnatural thing.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The moment I have something to do, the draughts are open and my chimney draws, and I am happy.
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 -
It seems at times as if they possessed some extra sense – the home sense – which operates unerringly.
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