I 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 BURROUGHSI have thought that a good test of civilization, perhaps one of the best, is country life.
More John Burroughs Quotes
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I find that something one gets from Emerson in early life does not leave him when he grows old.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
I have discovered the secret of happiness – it is work, either with the hands or the head.
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 -
Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
England is like the margin of a spring-run: near its source, always green, always cool, always moist, comparatively free from frost in winter and from drought in summer.
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 -
The spirit of man can endure only so much and when it is broken only a miracle can mend it.
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 -
The geologist is pretty sure to be an evolutionist.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
As with other phases of nature, I have probably loved the rocks more than I have studied them.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
My life has been a fortunate one; I was born under a lucky star. It seems as if both wind and tide had favoured me.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
We talk of communing with Nature, but ’tis with ourselves we commune.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
It seems at times as if they possessed some extra sense – the home sense – which operates unerringly.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Robin is one of the most native and democratic of our birds; he is one of the family, and seems much nearer to us than those rare, exotic visitants, as the orchard starling or rose-breasted grossbeak, with their distant, high-bred ways.
JOHN BURROUGHS