Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
JOHN BURROUGHSNaturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
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 BURROUGHSLike tens of thousands of others, I have been a spectator of, rather than a participator in, the activities – political, commercial, sociological, scientific – of the times in which I have lived.
JOHN BURROUGHSThe lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.
JOHN BURROUGHSWhen a herd of cattle see a strange object, they are not satisfied till each one has sniffed it; and the horse is cured of his fright at the robe, or the meal-bag, or other object, as soon as he can be induced to smell it.
JOHN BURROUGHSNature furnishes the conditions – the solitude – and the soul furnishes the entertainment.
JOHN BURROUGHSThe beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds.
JOHN BURROUGHSFor anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice – no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.
JOHN BURROUGHSTo me, nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which it grows and lives.
JOHN BURROUGHSWisdom cannot come by railroad or automobile or aeroplane, or be hurried up by telegraph or telephone.
JOHN BURROUGHSTo treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.
JOHN BURROUGHSThe 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 BURROUGHSMy motto is never to try to imitate anybody: I have always looked inward and followed the inward voice.
JOHN BURROUGHSLife is a struggle, but not a warfare.
JOHN BURROUGHSOnly man seems to be endowed with this faculty; he alone develops disinterested intelligence, intelligence that is not primarily concerned with his own safety and well-being but that looks abroad upon things.
JOHN BURROUGHSI am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.
JOHN BURROUGHS