John Burroughs Quotes

177 Sourced Quotes

On the beach [at Ocean Grove] the waves at times come wallowing ashore like a great flock of sheep; they break far out, and then comes that rushing line of tossing, leaping, woolly heads and shoulders; they are not steeds, but a wild mob of woolly-headed sheep.

John Burroughs
Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact. "I don't have any whisky," may be a fact but it is not a truth.

John Burroughs
I saw the moon run over a poor little star to-night. I suppose it will never open its eye again.

John Burroughs
Man lives in his emotions, his hopes and fears, his loves and sympathies, his predilections and his affinities, more than in his reason.

John Burroughs
What is size, what is time, distance, etc., to the Infinite? Nothing. The Infinite knows no time, no space, no great, no small, no beginning, no end.

John Burroughs
Few persons realize how much of their happiness, such as it is, is dependent upon their work.

John Burroughs
A fact that has passed through the mind of man, like lime or iron that has passed through his blood, has some quality or property superadded or brought out that it did not possess before.

John Burroughs
I always feel at home where the sugar maple grows.... glorious in autumn, a fountain of coolness in summer, sugar in its veins, gold in its foliage, warmth in its fibers, and health in it the year round.

John Burroughs
When a rock, loosened from its ties in the hills, once becomes a wanderer, it is restless ever after, and stirs in its sleep. Heat and cold expand and contract it, and make it creep down an incline. Hitch your rock to a sunbeam, and come back in a hundred years, and see how much it has moved.

John Burroughs
Invisible, impalpable forces streaming around us and through us; perpetual change and transformation on every hand; every day a day of creation, every night a revelation of unspeakable grandeur; suns and systems forming in the cyclones of stardust; the whole starry host of heavens flowing like a meadow brook.

John Burroughs
An infinity of celestial bodies ruled by rigidly mechanical laws, going their inevitable rounds at the risk of cosmic collisions and disruptions in which suns and systems are at times shipwrecked, unutterably sublime and aweinspiring, but lifeless, mindless, unhuman.

John Burroughs
The first step which a man or a people takes toward a culture is a love of the artificial, as such, while the last and crowning step is a love of the natural and the simple.

John Burroughs
To treat your facts with imagination is one thing; to imagine your facts is quite another.

John Burroughs
One must always cross-question nature if he would get at the truth, and he will not get at it then unless he frames his questions with great skill. Most persons are unreliable observers because they put only leading questions, or vague questions.

John Burroughs
Nature exists for man no more than she does for monkeys, and is as regardless of his life or pleasure or success as she is of the fleas. Her waves will drown him, her fire burn him, and her earth devour him, her storms and lightnings smite him, as if he were only a dog.

John Burroughs
The gift of perfume to a flower is a special grace like genius or like beauty, and never becomes common or cheap.

John Burroughs
Scientific faith is no more smooth sailing than is theological faith. One involves about as many mysteries, as many unthinkable truths, as the other.

John Burroughs
One thing we may affirm about the universe - it is logical; the conclusion always follows from the premise.

John Burroughs
The pleasure and value of every walk or journey we take may be doubled to us by carefully noting down the impressions it makes upon us.

John Burroughs
How many things may be affirmed of the visible, ponderable bodies on the earth's surface which are just the opposite of what is true of the invisible, imponderable bodies of the interior world of matter, and which also do not hold among the bodies of celestial space!

John Burroughs
Science strips Nature to her bare bones; literature and philosophy clothe the bones with something analogous to flesh and blood and warmth and color.

John Burroughs
Until science is mixed with emotion, and appeals to the heart and imagination, it is like dead inorganic matter; and when it becomes so mixed and so transformed, it is literature.

John Burroughs
Physics proves to us the impossibility of perpetual motion among visible, tangible bodies, at the same time that it reveals to us a world where perpetual motion is the rule — the world of molecules and atoms.

John Burroughs
What is size? What is time, distance, etc., to Nature? Nothing. She knows no time, no space, no great, no small, no beginning, no end, no life, no death; that is, she works without reference to these things.

John Burroughs
If we could grasp the handle of the Big Dipper, we could dip up the heavens and all their shinning pebbles.

John Burroughs
Science puts great weapons in men's hands for good or for evil, for war or for peace, for beauty or for ugliness, for life or for death, and how these weapons are used depends upon the motives that actuate us.

John Burroughs
How readily the bluebirds become our friends and neighbors when we offer them suitable nesting retreats!

John Burroughs
Evolution is not a mere process; it is a progress; it is not a circle, but a spiral.

John Burroughs
Nature comes home to one most when he is at home; the stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also.

John Burroughs
The scientific spirit, when applied to historical research, is - like chemistry applied to agriculture - valuable, but good crops have been and can be grown without it.

John Burroughs