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 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
-
-
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 -
The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
August is the month of the high-sailing hawks. The hen hawk is the most noticeable. He likes the haze and calm of these long, warm days. He is a bird of leisure and seems always at his ease. How beautiful and majestic are his movements!
JOHN BURROUGHS -
More than any other poet, Whitman is what we make him; more than any other poet, his greatest value is in what he suggests and implies rather than in what he portrays, and more than any other poet must he wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of himself.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Some men are like nails, very easily drawn; others however are more like rivets never drawn at all.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
To many forms of life of our northern lands, winter means a long sleep; to others, it means what it means to many fortunate human beings – travels in warm climes.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The birth of a baby and the blooming of a flower are natural events, but the laboratory methods forever fail to give us the key to the secret of either.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Only 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 BURROUGHS -
The building of cities and towns, the cutting down of forests, and the draining of pools and swamps have deprived American birds of their original homes and food supply.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The love of nature is a different thing from the love of science, though the two may go together.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
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 -
I went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth.
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 -
Life is a struggle, but not a warfare.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
I have discovered the secret of happiness. It is work.
JOHN BURROUGHS