John Burroughs Quotes

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John Burroughs

Profession : Author

Birth : April 3, 1837

Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.

John Burroughs

Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New England, and of English literature generally, as of another order. He is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer.

John Burroughs

To strong, susceptible characters, the music of nature is not confined to sweet sounds.

John Burroughs

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

John Burroughs

Like tens of thousands of others, I have been a spectator of, rather than a participator in, the activities - political, commercial, sociological, scientific - of the times in which I have lived.

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 am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.

John Burroughs

To regard the soul and body as one, or to ascribe to consciousness a physiological origin, is not detracting from its divinity; it is rather conferring divinity upon the body.

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

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

John Burroughs

Emerson's fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during his lifetime by the books he gave to the world.

John Burroughs

It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life because it takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation.

John Burroughs

The art of the bird is to conceal its nest both as to position and as to material, but now and then it is betrayed into weaving into its structure showy and bizarre bits of this or that, which give its secret away and which seem to violate all the traditions of its kind.

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

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

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

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

My life has been a fortunate one; I was born under a lucky star. It seems as if both wind and tide had favoured me. I have suffered no great losses, or defeats, or illness, or accidents, and have undergone no great struggles or privations; I have had no grouch. I have not wanted the earth.

John Burroughs

One reason, doubtless, why squirrels are so bold and reckless in leaping through the trees is that, if they miss their hold and fall, they sustain no injury. Every species of tree-squirrel seems to be capable of a sort of rudimentary flying, at least of making itself into a parachute, so as to ease or break a fall or a leap from a great height.

John Burroughs

Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.

John Burroughs