John Burroughs Quotes

177 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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 rainbow is truly an apparition; you cannot approach it; you cannot grasp it, or find its end. I has no end, and no beginning. It is also born of the spray of cataracts, but sways not as the spray sways. It is one of the oldest and most striking phenomena in nature, and one of the most subtle and elusive.

John Burroughs
To clothe science with flesh and blood, to breathe into it the breath of life, is a creative work which only the Poet can do.

John Burroughs
Next to the trees, rocks are points of interest in the landscape. Slumbering here and there upon the turf, they enhance the sense of repose. How expressionless and uninteresting the landscape in one of the prairie States...

John Burroughs
You find in Nature only what you bring to her. If you are joyful, she is joyful; if you are sad, she is sad. The religious soul find Nature very religious. To the scientist she means science, and to the poet she means picture and parable. She is all things to all men.

John Burroughs
Close scrutiny of an object in nature will nearly always yield some significant fact...

John Burroughs
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.

John Burroughs
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
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
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
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
Little things explain big things. A grain of sand is the Alps on a small scale. A drop of water illustrates the laws of the ocean. The fall of an apple revealed to the mind of Newton the laws of the spheres.

John Burroughs
The youth of the earth is in the soil and in the trees and verdure that springs from it.

John Burroughs
At their everlasting tasks, but biology is as a flower that cometh in a day and on the morrow is cut down.

John Burroughs
He who marvels at the beauty of the world in summer will find equal cause for wonder and admiration in winter.

John Burroughs
There are few places on the farm where there is so much live natural history to be gathered as in the orchard. All the wild creatures seem to feel the friendly and congenial atmosphere of the orchard.

John Burroughs