The Infinite cannot be measured. The plan of Nature is so immense, but she has no plan, no scheme, but to go on and on forever. What is size, what is time, distance, to the Infinite?
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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As with other phases of nature, I have probably loved the rocks more than I have studied them.
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 -
England is not a country of granite and marble, but of chalk, marl, and clay.
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 -
How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Some men are like nails, very easily drawn; others however are more like rivets never drawn at all.
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 -
The pond-lily is a star and easily takes the first place among lilies; and the expeditions to her haunts, and the gathering her where she rocks upon the dark.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Wisdom cannot come by railroad or automobile or aeroplane, or be hurried up by telegraph or telephone.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
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 BURROUGHS -
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 BURROUGHS -
Even in rugged Scotland, nature is scarcely wilder than a mountain sheep, certainly a good way short of the ferity of the moose and caribou.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
My motto is never to try to imitate anybody: I have always looked inward and followed the inward voice.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
To regard the soul and body as one, or to ascribe to consciousness a physiological origin, is not detracting from its divinity; it is rather conferring divinity upon the body.
JOHN BURROUGHS