John Burroughs Quotes

177 Sourced Quotes

An old tree, unlike an old person, as long as it lives at all, always has a young streak, or rather ring, in it. It wears a girdle of perpetual youth.

John Burroughs
Nature made the bluebird she wished to propitiate both the sky and the earth, so she gave him the color of the one on his back and the hue of the other on his breast, and ordained that his appearance in spring should denote that the strife and war between these two elements was at an end.

John Burroughs
Look up at the miracle of the falling snow,—the air a dizzy maze of whirling, eddying flakes, noiselessly transforming the world, the exquisite crystals dropping in ditch and gutter, and disguising in the same suit of spotless livery all objects upon which they fall.

John Burroughs
The pine has but one idea, and that is to mount heavenward by regular steps - tree of fate, tree of dark shadows and of mystery.

John Burroughs
Rocks do not recommend the land to the tiller of the soil, but they recommend it to those who reap a harvest of another sort - the artist, the poet, the walker, the student and lover of all primitive open-air things.

John Burroughs
Man is at the top, in his own estimation, and thinks the sun and the moon are for him; but he is no more an end than a frog is; and is not so much atop as the birds are. He appeared in the plan, and he will disappear in the plan, and Nature values him only as manure - squanders him as recklessly as autumn leaves.

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 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
The universe, considered as a machine, however scientific it may be, has neither value to the spirit nor charm to the imagination.

John Burroughs
Then, again, how annoying to be told it is only five miles to the next place when it is really eight or ten!

John Burroughs
It is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp winter air is full of it.

John Burroughs
The cell is an intelligent being; through the chemicophysical forces it builds up a man and fits him with a brain and all his wonderful organs and powers. It builds the flower, the seed, the leaf, the stalk, the root, and through the mystery of inheritance keeps up the succession of its kind.

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

John Burroughs
When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is that I really see there, I am constrained to say, "There is no God.".I see no lineaments of personality, no human traits, but an energy upon whose currents solar systems are but babbles.

John Burroughs
The vast ice-engine that we call a glacier is almost as silent as the slumbering rocks, and, to all but the eye of science, nearly as immobile, save where it discharges into the sea. It is noisy in its dying, but in the height of its power it is as still as the falling snow of which it is made.

John Burroughs