John Burroughs - Signs and seasons (1886)

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Before the bud swells, before the grass springs, before the plough is started, comes the sugar harvest. It is sequel of the bitter frost; a sap run is the sweet goodbye of winter.

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
A fact that has passed through the mind of man, like lime or iron that has passed through his blood, has some quality or property superadded or brought out that it did not possess before.

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
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 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
Man can have but one interest in nature, namely, to see himself reflected or interpreted there, and we quickly neglect both poet and philosopher who fail to satisfy, in some measure, this feeling.

John Burroughs
Dogmatism about nature, or about anything else, very often turns out to be an ungrateful cur that bites the hand that reared it.

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