John Burroughs - Nature Quotes

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The truths of naturalism do not satisfy the moral and religious nature.

John Burroughs
To the scientist Nature is a storehouse of facts, laws, processes; to the artist she is a storehouse of pictures; to the poet she is a storehouse of images, fancies, a source of inspiration; to the moralist she is a storehouse of precepts and parables; to all she may be a source of knowledge and joy.

John Burroughs
If I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature....

John Burroughs
One goes to Nature only for hints and half-truths. Her facts are crude until you have absorbed them or translated them.... It is not so much what we see as what the thing seen suggests.

John Burroughs
Nature is not benevolent; Nature is just, gives pound for pound, measure for measure, makes no exceptions, never tempers her decrees with mercy, or winks at any infringement of her laws.

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

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
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 life of nature we must meet halfway; it is shy, withdrawn, and blends itself with a vast neutral background. We must be initiated; it is an order the secrets of which are well guarded.

John Burroughs