John Burroughs - Time Quotes

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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
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
There are no rational checks in Nature - all is left to chance; and the scheme works because Nature has all power and all time. There is no other, no rival. The All can go its own way; to play the game, to win and lose - the stakes are Nature's in any event.

John Burroughs
Nature does not guard against waste or delay. All time and all matter are hers, and her losses and gains are all one.

John Burroughs
Success in walking is not to let your right foot know what your left foot doeth. Your heart must furnish such music that in keeping time to it your feet will carry you around the globe without knowing it.

John Burroughs
A Notebook containing a few smooth pebbles which the waves of Thought leave, from time to time, upon my Shores.

John Burroughs
The bluebird enjoys the preeminence of being the first bit of color that cheers our northern landscape. The other birds that arrive about the same time--the sparrow, the robin, the phoebe-bird--are clad in neutral tints, gray, brown, or russet; but the bluebird brings one of the primary hues and the divinest of them all.

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
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
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
The atmosphere of our time is fast being cleared of the fumes and deadly gases that arose during the carboniferous age of theology.

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
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
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
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
The rocks are not so close akin to us as the soil; they are one more remove from us; but they lie back of all, and are the final source of all.... Time, geologic time, looks out at us from the rocks as from no other objects in the landscape.

John Burroughs
Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me.

John Burroughs
The rocks have a history; gray and weatherworn, they are veterans of many battles; they have most of them marched in the ranks of vast stone brigades during the ice age; they have been torn from the hills, recruited from the mountaintops, and marshaled on the plains and in the valleys; and now the elemental war is over, there they lie waging a gentle but incessant warfare with time and slowly, oh, so slowly, yielding to its attacks!

John Burroughs
Natural history is a matter of observation; it is a harvest which you gather when and where you find it growing. Birds and squirrels and flowers are not always in season, but philosophy we have always with us. It is a crop which we can grow and reap at all times and in all places and it has its own value and brings its own satisfaction.

John Burroughs