I crave and seek a natural explanation of all phenomena upon this earth, but the word ‘natural’ to me implies more than mere chemistry and physics.
JOHN BURROUGHSThe 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.
More John Burroughs Quotes
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Why, we have invented the whole machinery of the supernatural, with its unseen spirits and powers, good and bad, to account for things, because we found the universal everyday nature too cheap, too common, too vulgar.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
The queen, I say, is the mother bee; it is undoubtedly complimenting her to call her a queen and invest her with regal authority, yet she is a superb creature and looks every inch a queen.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
There is a great deal of speculation in the eye of an animal, but very little science.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
I find that something one gets from Emerson in early life does not leave him when he grows old.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
Emerson’s fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during his lifetime by the books he gave to the world.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
If you think you can do it, you can.
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 -
The city, a place to which one goes to do business, is a place where men overreach each other in the fight for money. But it is not a place in which one can live.
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 -
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 are really here to be happy and to make others happy.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
To be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring – these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
JOHN BURROUGHS -
It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.
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 -
Where country life is safe and enjoyable, where many of the conveniences and appliances of the town are joined to the large freedom and large benefits of the country, a high state of civilization prevails.
JOHN BURROUGHS