John Burroughs - Science Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

View all John Burroughs Quotes
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
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
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
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
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
Literature interprets life and nature in terms of our sentiments and emotions; science interprets them in terms of our understanding.

John Burroughs
Science displeases literature when it dehumanizes nature and shows us irrefragable laws when we had looked for humanistic divinities.

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
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
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
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
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
If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.

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

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

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
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
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
Science and literature in their aims and methods have but little in common. Demonstrable fact is the province of the one; sentiment is the province of the other.

John Burroughs
Biological science has hunted the secret of vitality like a detective, and it has done some famous work; but it has not yet unraveld the mystery.

John Burroughs
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

John Burroughs
Science has fairly turned us out of our comfortable little anthropomorphic notion of things into the great out-of-doors of the universe. We must and will get used to the chill, yea, to the cosmic chill, if need be. Our religious instincts will be all the hardier for it.

John Burroughs
Science sees the process of evolution from the outside, as one might a train of cars going by, and resolves it into the physical and mechanical elements, without getting any nearer the reason of its going by, or the point of its departure or destination.

John Burroughs
Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the miraculous universe.

John Burroughs