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 BURROUGHSWhitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country’s poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.
More John Burroughs Quotes
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Living in the city is a discordant thing, an unnatural thing.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
If I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature. And the greatest of these, at least the most constant and always at hand, is nature.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
How many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday-lives, and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!
JOHN BURROUGHS -
It seems at times as if they possessed some extra sense – the home sense – which operates unerringly.
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 moment I have something to do, the draughts are open and my chimney draws, and I am happy.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Man takes root at his feet, and at best, he is no more than a potted plant in his house or carriage till he has established communication with the soil by the loving and magnetic touch of his soles to it.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The spirit of man can endure only so much and when it is broken only a miracle can mend it.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Fear, love, and hunger were the agents that developed the wits of the lower animals, as they were, of course, the prime factors in developing the intelligence of man.
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The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.
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 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 -
Life is a struggle, but not a warfare.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
We talk of communing with Nature, but ’tis with ourselves we commune.
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As with other phases of nature, I have probably loved the rocks more than I have studied them.
JOHN BURROUGHS