John Burroughs Quotes

177 Sourced Quotes

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.

John Burroughs
The earth is not alone, it is not like a single apple on a tree; there are many apples on the tree, and there are many trees in the orchard.

John Burroughs
Nature exists to the mind not as an absolute realization, but as a condition, as something constantly becoming... It is suggestive and prospective; a body in motion, and not an object at rest.

John Burroughs
The river idealizes the landscape. It multiplies and heightens the beauty of the day and season. A fair day it makes more fair, and a wild, tempestuous day it makes more wild. The face of winter makes it doubly rigid and corpse-like, and to the face of spring it adds new youth and sparkle.

John Burroughs
Man can have but one interest in nature, namely, to see himself reflected or interpreted there, and we quickly neglect both poet and philosopher who fail to satisfy, in some measure, this feeling.

John Burroughs
Success in walking is not to let your right foot know what your left foot doeth. Your heart must furnish such music that in keeping time to it your feet will carry you around the globe without knowing it.

John Burroughs
A mind that has a lively fancy and a sense of mystery will interpret phenomena quite differently from a mind in which these things are absent.

John Burroughs
A Notebook containing a few smooth pebbles which the waves of Thought leave, from time to time, upon my Shores.

John Burroughs
O bluebird, welcome back again, Thy azure coat and ruddy vest, Are hues that April loveth best....

John Burroughs
The charm of the songs of birds, like that of a nation's popular airs and hymns, is so little a question of intrinsic musical excellence and so largely a matter of association and suggestion, or of subjective coloring and reminiscence, that it is perhaps entirely natural for every people to think their own feathered songsters the best.

John Burroughs
All sounds are sharper in winter; the air transmits better. At night I hear more distinctly the steady roar of the North Mountain. In summer it is a sort of complacent purr, as the breezes stroke down its sides; but in winter always the same low, sullen growl.

John Burroughs
The bluebird enjoys the preeminence of being the first bit of color that cheers our northern landscape. The other birds that arrive about the same time--the sparrow, the robin, the phoebe-bird--are clad in neutral tints, gray, brown, or russet; but the bluebird brings one of the primary hues and the divinest of them all.

John Burroughs
Science is probably unfavorable to the growth of literature because it does not throw man back upon himself and concentrate him as the old belief did; it takes him away from himself, away from human relations and emotions, and leads him on and on.

John Burroughs
Nature does not care whether the hunter slay the beast or the beast the hunter; she will make good compost of them both, and her ends are prospered whichever succeed.

John Burroughs
One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are the weeds.

John Burroughs
The scientific interpretation of the universe repels a great many minds because it lays the emphasis upon matter itself instead of upon something supermaterial. It hesitates to name a creative energy, but makes matter itself creative, and does not try to help it out with teleological conception.

John Burroughs
Oh, Spring is surely coming, Her couriers fill the air; Each morn are new arrivals, Each night her ways prepare; I scent her fragrant garments, Her foot is on the stair.

John Burroughs
Some birds represent the majesty of Nature, like the eagles ; others its ferocity, like the hawks ; others its cunning, like the crow; others its sweetness and melody, like the song-birds. The loon represents its wildness and solitariness.

John Burroughs
In the great sciences, like astronomy and geology, one gets wholes; the imagination has play-room. The cosmic laws launch him upon a shoreless sea. One is blown upon by a breeze from eternity. The same with biology in the light of evolution.

John Burroughs
After science has done its best the mystery is as great as ever, and the imagination and the emotions have just as free a field as before.

John Burroughs
Nature works with such simple means! A little more or a little of this or that, and behold the difference!

John Burroughs
The honey-bee goes forth from the hive in spring like the dove from Noah's ark, and it is not till after many days that she brings back the olive leaf, which in this case is a pellet of golden pollen upon each hip...

John Burroughs
Originality is Nature expressed, imitation is Nature suppressed.

John Burroughs
Science makes no claim to infallibility; it leaves that claim to be made by theologians.

John Burroughs
Science explains the rainbow, but literature sees it as a symbol and a promise. So with the sunset or the sunrise. Science knows all about the diamond, but knows not why it is so prized by us. It explains the pearl, but not the pearl necklace.

John Burroughs
Geologic time is the most potent of the gods of change. He wields an invisible hammer beside which the hammer of Thor is a child's toy. Its slow, silent blows break in through granite rocks as big as a house.

John Burroughs
We can outrun the wind and the storm, but we cannot outrun the demon of hurry.

John Burroughs
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.

John Burroughs
Geologic time! How the striking of the great clock, whose hours are millions of years, reverberates out of the abyss of the past! Mountains fall, and the foundations of the earth shift, as it beats out the moments of terrestrial history.

John Burroughs
The marble face of Death! What unspeakable repose and silence there is in it!

John Burroughs