John Burroughs Quotes

177 Sourced Quotes

The difference between a precious stone and a common stone is not an essential difference - not a difference of substance, but of arrangement of the particles - the crystallization.

John Burroughs
A landscape without rocks lacks something. Without the outcropping ledge, the faces of the hills lack eyebrows; without a drift boulder here and there, the fields lack the rugged elemental touch.

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

John Burroughs
The love of nature is different from the love of science, though the two may go together.

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

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

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

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
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
Nature does not work by prefixes and suffixes, but by unfolding and ever unfolding, or developing out of latent innate powers and possibilities.

John Burroughs
One man's science must be another man's science; all science is a whole - a pushing farther and farther of the lines of knowledge into nature.

John Burroughs
What is the end of Nature? Where is the end of a sphere? The sphere balances at any and every point. So everything in Nature is at the top, and yet no one thing is at the top.

John Burroughs
The simplicity of winter has a deep moral. The return of Nature, after such a career of splendor and prodigality, to habits so simple and austere, is not lost either upon the head or the heart. It is the philosopher coming back from the banquet and the wine to a cup of water and a crust of bread.

John Burroughs
The gold of nature does not look like gold at the first glance. It must be smelted and refined in the mind of the observer. And one must crush mountains of quartz and wash hills of sand to get it.

John Burroughs
The swells that beat upon the ocean are not the result of a local agitation of the water; the pulse of the earth is in them; the pull of the sun and the moon is in them. They are more cosmic than terrestrial.

John Burroughs
We study botany so hard that we miss the charm of the flower entirely.

John Burroughs
She [Nature] works with reference to no measure of time, no limit of space, and with an abundance of material not expressed by exhaustless.

John Burroughs
It is hard even for the rocks to keep still in this world of motion, but it takes the hour-hand of many years to mark their progress.

John Burroughs
There is no creature with which man has surrounded himself that seems so much like a product of civilization, so much like the result of development on special lines and in special fields, as the honey-bee.

John Burroughs
The mysteries of religion are of a different order from those of science; they are parts of an arbitrary system of man's own creation; they contradict our reason and our experience, while the mysteries of science are revealed by our reason, and transcend our experience.

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
Originality is Nature expressed, imitation is Nature suppressed.

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

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
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
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
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