The trunk of a tree is like a community where only one generation at a time is engaged in active business, the great mass of the population being retired and adding solidity and permanence to the social organism.
JOHN BURROUGHSThe trunk of a tree is like a community where only one generation at a time is engaged in active business, the great mass of the population being retired and adding solidity and permanence to the social organism.
JOHN BURROUGHSI have suffered no great losses, or defeats, or illness, or accidents, and have undergone no great struggles or privations; I have had no grouch. I have not wanted the earth.
JOHN BURROUGHSThere are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.
JOHN BURROUGHSThe 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 BURROUGHSThe fine, hair-like rootlets at the bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at the top.
JOHN BURROUGHSOur flying squirrel is in no proper sense a flyer. On the ground, he is more helpless than a chipmunk, because less agile. He can only sail or slide down a steep incline from the top of one tree to the foot of another.
JOHN BURROUGHSTo me, nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which it grows and lives.
JOHN BURROUGHSI go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.
JOHN BURROUGHSMan 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 BURROUGHSThe lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.
JOHN BURROUGHSNature teaches more than she preaches.
JOHN BURROUGHSThe 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 BURROUGHSTo 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 BURROUGHSThe 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 BURROUGHSThere is a great deal of speculation in the eye of an animal, but very little science.
JOHN BURROUGHSThe 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