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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
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Nature works with such simple means! A little more or a little of this or that, and behold the difference!
John Burroughs
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are the weeds.
John Burroughs
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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O bluebird, welcome back again, Thy azure coat and ruddy vest, Are hues that April loveth best....
John Burroughs
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A Notebook containing a few smooth pebbles which the waves of Thought leave, from time to time, upon my Shores.
John Burroughs
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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We have produced some good walkers and saunterers, and some noted climbers; but as a staple recreation, as a daily practice, the mass of the people dislike and despise walking.
John Burroughs
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Science enables us to understand our own ignorance and limitations, and so puts us at our ease amid the splendors and mysteries of creation.
John Burroughs
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The most precious things of life are near at hand, without money and without price. Each of you has the whole wealth of the universe at your very door. All that I ever had, and still have, may be yours by stretching forth your hand and taking it.
John Burroughs
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This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
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It might almost be said that the birds are all birds of the poets and of no one else, because it is only the poetical temperament that fully responds to them.
John Burroughs
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Quote of the day
Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
John Burroughs
Creative Commons
Born:
April 3, 1837
Died:
March 29, 1921
(aged 83)
Bio:
John Burroughs was an American naturalist and nature essayist, active in the U.S. conservation movement. The first of his essay collections was Wake-Robin in 1871.
Known for:
The art of seeing things
Ways of nature (1904)
Wake-Robin (1871)
Accepting the universe (1913)
Signs and seasons (1886)
Most used words:
nature
life
find
science
man
stars
time
mind
universe
real
storehouse
love
place
water
winter
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