John Burroughs Quotes

Without the name, any flower is still more or less a stranger to you. The name betrays its family, its relationship to other flowers, and gives the mind something tangible to grasp. It is very difficult for persons who have had no special training to learn the names of the flowers from the botany.

The geologist is pretty sure to be an evolutionist.

A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.

Man has climbed up from some lower animal form, but he has, as it were, pulled the ladder up after him.

If you think you can do it, you can.

It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.

When a herd of cattle see a strange object, they are not satisfied till each one has sniffed it; and the horse is cured of his fright at the robe, or the meal-bag, or other object, as soon as he can be induced to smell it.

Our 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.

Emerson is the spokesman and prophet of youth and of a formative, idealistic age. His is a voice from the heights which are ever bathed in the sunshine of the spirit.

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.