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

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.

— John Burroughs

Leap, and the net will appear.

— John Burroughs

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.

— John Burroughs

In October, a maple tree before your window lights up your room like a great lamp. Even on cloudy days, its presence helps to dispel the gloom.

— John Burroughs

A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did.

— John Burroughs

The secret of happiness is something to do.

— John Burroughs

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.

— John Burroughs

A man can get discouraged many times but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying.

— John Burroughs

To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday.

— John Burroughs

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see. The longer I live, the more my mind dwells upon the beauty and the wonder of the world.

— John Burroughs

Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all - that has been my religion.

— John Burroughs

If I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature. And the greatest of these, at least the most constant and always at hand, is nature.

— 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 Infinite cannot be measured. The plan of Nature is so immense, but she has no plan, no scheme, but to go on and on forever. What is size, what is time, distance, to the Infinite? Nothing. The Infinite knows no time, no space, no great, no small, no beginning, no end.

— John Burroughs

Wisdom cannot come by railroad or automobile or aeroplane, or be hurried up by telegraph or telephone.

— John Burroughs

The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds - how many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday-lives, and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!

— John Burroughs

Fear, love, and hunger were the agents that developed the wits of the lower animals, as they were, of course, the prime factors in developing the intelligence of man.

— John Burroughs

You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.

— John Burroughs

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.

— John Burroughs

We now use the word 'nature' very much as our fathers used the word 'God.'

— John Burroughs

Blessed is the man who has some congenial work, some occupation in which he can put his heart, and which affords a complete outlet to all the forces there are in him.

— John Burroughs

Robin is one of the most native and democratic of our birds; he is one of the family, and seems much nearer to us than those rare, exotic visitants, as the orchard starling or rose-breasted grossbeak, with their distant, high-bred ways.

— John Burroughs

The queen, I say, is the mother bee; it is undoubtedly complimenting her to call her a queen and invest her with regal authority, yet she is a superb creature and looks every inch a queen.

— John Burroughs

Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature.

— John Burroughs

The country is more of a wilderness, more of a wild solitude, in the winter than in the summer. The wild comes out. The urban, the cultivated, is hidden or negatived.

— John Burroughs

To me, nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which it grows and lives: the fine, hair-like rootlets at the bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at the top.

— 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

My motto is never to try to imitate anybody: I have always looked inward and followed the inward voice.

— John Burroughs

The pond-lily is a star and easily takes the first place among lilies; and the expeditions to her haunts, and the gathering her where she rocks upon the dark, secluded waters of some pool or lakelet, are the crown and summit of the floral expeditions of summer.

— John Burroughs

Living in the city is a discordant thing, an unnatural thing. The city, a place to which one goes to do business, is a place where men overreach each other in the fight for money. But it is not a place in which one can live.

— John Burroughs

All birds are incipient or would-be songsters in the spring. I find corroborative evidence of this even in the crowing of the cock.

— John Burroughs

The animal world seizes its food in masses little and big, and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable, through the agency of the solvent power of water, absorbs its nourishment molecule by molecule.

— John Burroughs

Our flying squirrel is in no proper sense a flyer. On the ground, he is more helpless than a chipmunk, because less agile. He can only sail or slide down a steep incline from the top of one tree to the foot of another.

— John Burroughs

If one gains an interest in the history of the earth, he is quite sure to gain an interest in the history of the life on the earth. If the former illustrates the theory of development, so must the latter. The geologist is pretty sure to be an evolutionist.

— John Burroughs

England is not a country of granite and marble, but of chalk, marl, and clay.

— John Burroughs

The red squirrel is more common and less dignified than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty larceny about the barns and grain-fields.

— John Burroughs

A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.

— John Burroughs

The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.

— John Burroughs

A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.

— John Burroughs

If you think you can do it, you can.

— John Burroughs

The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.

— John Burroughs

For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice - no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.

— 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

A man can get discouraged many times but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying.

— John Burroughs

The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.

— John Burroughs

How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.

— John Burroughs

For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice - no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.

— John Burroughs

Life is a struggle, but not a warfare.

— John Burroughs

In winter, the stars seem to have rekindled their fires, the moon achieves a fuller triumph, and the heavens wear a look of a more exalted simplicity. Summer is more wooing and seductive, more versatile and human, appeals to the affections and the sentiments, and fosters inquiry and the art impulse.

— John Burroughs

The spirit of man can endure only so much and when it is broken only a miracle can mend it.

— John Burroughs

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.

— John Burroughs

The secret of happiness is something to do.

— John Burroughs

We are really here to be happy and to make others happy.

— John Burroughs

The common bees will never use their sting upon the queen; if she is to be disposed of, they starve her to death, and the queen herself will sting nothing but royalty, nothing but a rival queen.

— John Burroughs

A sap run is the sweet goodbye of winter. It is the fruit of the equal marriage of the sun and frost.

— John Burroughs

As life nears its end with me, I find myself meditating more and more upon the mystery of its nature and origin, yet without the least hope that I can find out the ways of the Eternal in this or in any other world.

— John Burroughs

Fear, love, and hunger were the agents that developed the wits of the lower animals, as they were, of course, the prime factors in developing the intelligence of man.

— John Burroughs

A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did.

— John Burroughs

I went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth.

— John Burroughs

Living in the city is a discordant thing, an unnatural thing. The city, a place to which one goes to do business, is a place where men overreach each other in the fight for money. But it is not a place in which one can live.

— John Burroughs

There never was a happier or more devoted husband than the male bluebird. He is the gay champion and escort of the female at all times, and while she is sitting, he feeds her regularly.

— John Burroughs

When the woodpecker is searching for food, or laying siege to some hidden grub, the sound of his hammer is dead or muffled and is heard but a few yards. It is only upon dry, seasoned timber, freed of its bark, that he beats his reveille to spring and wooes his mate.

— John Burroughs

We love the sight of the brown and ruddy earth; it is the color of life, while a snow-covered plain is the face of death. Yet snow is but the mask of the life-giving rain; it, too, is the friend of man, the tender, sculpturesque, immaculate, warming, fertilizing snow.

— John Burroughs

I have discovered the secret of happiness - it is work, either with the hands or the head. The moment I have something to do, the draughts are open and my chimney draws, and I am happy.

— John Burroughs

Most young people find botany a dull study. So it is, as taught from the text-books in the schools; but study it yourself in the fields and woods, and you will find it a source of perennial delight.

— John Burroughs

Women are about the best lovers of nature, after all; at least of nature in her milder and more familiar forms. The feminine character, the feminine perceptions, intuitions, delicacy, sympathy, quickness, are more responsive to natural forms and influences than is the masculine mind.

— John Burroughs

The phoebe-bird is a wise architect and perhaps enjoys as great an immunity from danger, both in its person and its nest, as any other bird. Its modest ashen-gray suit is the color of the rocks where it builds, and the moss of which it makes such free use gives to its nest the look of a natural growth or accretion.

— John Burroughs

One may summon his philosophy when they are beaten in battle, not till then.

— John Burroughs

As with other phases of nature, I have probably loved the rocks more than I have studied them.

— John Burroughs

If you think you can do it, you can.

— John Burroughs

In winter, the stars seem to have rekindled their fires, the moon achieves a fuller triumph, and the heavens wear a look of a more exalted simplicity. Summer is more wooing and seductive, more versatile and human, appeals to the affections and the sentiments, and fosters inquiry and the art impulse.

— John Burroughs

Leap, and the net will appear.

— John Burroughs

I have discovered the secret of happiness - it is work, either with the hands or the head. The moment I have something to do, the draughts are open and my chimney draws, and I am happy.

— John Burroughs

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring — these are some of the rewards of the simple life.

— 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

Theology passes; religion, as a sentiment or feeling of awe and reverence in the presence of the vastness and mystery of the universe, remains.

— John Burroughs

We are like figures which some great demonstrator draws upon the blackboard of Time. A problem is to be solved, without doubt; what the problem is, we, the figures, cannot know and do not need to know; all we know is that sooner or later we shall be sponged off the board and other figures take our places, and the demonstration go on.

— John Burroughs

From the first the progress of man has been slowly but surely from the artificial to the natural, from the arbitrary and chimerical to the simple and scientific. Getting himself and his affairs more and more into natural currents and following them, this is the way man has progressed.

— John Burroughs

A sap run is the sweet goodbye of winter. It is the fruit of the equal marriage of the sun and frost.

— John Burroughs

All political progress has been the removal of forced and artificial relations among men, and the establishment of natural relations. Democracy is a search for natural leaders and the rights and privileges that belong to man by virtue of his manhood.

— John Burroughs

Science, in the broadest sense, is simply that which may be verified; but how much of that which theology accepts and goes upon is verifiable by human reason or experience?

— John Burroughs

...the Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.

— John Burroughs

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

— John Burroughs

The deeper our insight into the methods of nature . . . the more incredible the popular Christianity seems to us.

— John Burroughs

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

— John Burroughs

Hence when the man of science says, 'There is no God,' he only gives voice to the feeling of the inadequacy of the old anthropomorphic conception, in the presence of the astounding facts of the universe.

— John Burroughs

We are here to see and contemplate the great spectacle.

— 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

In us or through us the Primal Mind will have contemplated and enjoyed its own works and will continue to do so as long as human life endures on this planet.

— John Burroughs

Man’s craving for the supernatural is as natural as our discounting of the present moment... The natural becomes trite and commonplace to us and we take refuge in an imaginary world above and beyond it.

— John Burroughs

Every day is a Sabbath to me. All pure water is holy water, and this earth is a celestial abode.

— John Burroughs

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

— John Burroughs

Man takes root at his feet, and at best, he is no more than a potted plant in his house or carriage till he has established communication with the soil by the loving and magnetic touch of his soles to it.

— John Burroughs

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.

— 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

In October, a maple tree before your window lights up your room like a great lamp. Even on cloudy days, its presence helps to dispel the gloom.

— John Burroughs

Fear, love, and hunger were the agents that developed the wits of the lower animals, as they were, of course, the prime factors in developing the intelligence of man.

— John Burroughs

The dog is often quick to resent a kick, be it from man or beast, but I have never known him to show anger at the door that slammed to and hit him. Probably, if the door held him by his tail or his limb, it would quickly receive the imprint of his teeth.

— John Burroughs

If you think you can do it, you can.

— John Burroughs

Leap, and the net will appear.

— John Burroughs

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.

— John Burroughs

We are beginning to see that money, after all, is not the main thing. The real values cannot be bought and sold.

— John Burroughs

One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: ‘To rise above little things’.

— John Burroughs

A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did.

— John Burroughs