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.

Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.

Some men are like nails very easily drawn others however are more like rivets never drawn at all.

August is the month of the high sailing hawks. The hen hawk is the most noticeable. He likes the haze and calm of these long warm days. He is a bird of leisure and seems always at his ease. How beautiful and majestic are his movements

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.

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

Sometimes I am worried by the thought of the effect that life in the city will have on coming generations.

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!

The gift of perfume to a flower is a special grace like genius or like beauty, and never becomes common or cheap.

The distribution of plants in a given locality is not more marked and defined than that of the birds. Show a botanist a landscape, and he will tell you where to look for the lady's-slipper, the columbine, or the harebell. On the same principles, the ornithologist will direct you where to look for the greenlets, the wood-sparrow, or the chewink.

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.

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

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.

When a herd of cattle see a strange object, they are not satisfied till each one has sniffed it; and the horse is cured of his fright at the robe, or the meal-bag, or other object, as soon as he can be induced to smell it. There is a great deal of speculation in the eye of an animal, but very little science.

No one else looks out upon the world so kindly and charitably as the pedestrian; no one else gives and takes so much from the country he passes through.

A man can fail many times but he isnt a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.

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.

It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.

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.

England is like the margin of a spring run near its source always green always cool always moist comparatively free from frost in winter and from drought in summer.

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.

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

Some scenes you juggle two balls, some scenes you juggle three balls, some scenes you can juggle five balls. The key is always to speak in your own voice. Speak the truth. That's Acting 101. Then you start putting layers on top of that.

There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain that it is positively bad.

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

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

I have discovered the secret of happiness. It is work.

Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.

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.

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

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

Man has climbed up from some lower animal form, but he has, as it were, pulled the ladder up after him.

When Darwin published his conclusion that man was descended from an apelike ancestor who was again descended from a still lower type, most people were shocked by the thought; it was intensely repugnant to their feelings.

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.

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.

When you bait the hook with your heart the fish always bite.

Leap, and the net will appear.

He who marvels at the beauty of the world in summer will find equal cause for wonder and admiration in winter.... 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.

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.

There is something very human in this apparent mirth and mockery of the squirrels. It seems to be a sort of ironical laughter, and implies self-conscious pride and exultation in the laughter.

The floating vapour is just as true an illustration of the law of gravity as the falling avalanche.

I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.

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.

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

I am for 100 per cent Americanism, 100 per cent efficiency, and 100 per cent life. I expect to live to be 100 years old.

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.

Nearly every season, I make the acquaintance of one or more new flowers. It takes years to exhaust the botanical treasures of any one considerable neighborhood, unless one makes a dead set at it, like an herbalist.

How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and colour are their last days.

August is the month of the high-sailing hawks. The hen hawk is the most noticeable. He likes the haze and calm of these long, warm days. He is a bird of leisure and seems always at his ease. How beautiful and majestic are his movements!

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

Most birds are very stiff-necked, like the robin, and as they run or hop upon the ground, carry the head as if it were riveted to the body. Not so the oven-bird, or the other birds that walk, as the cow-bunting, or the quail, or the crow. They move the head forward with the movement of the feet.

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.

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.

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

Father knew me not. All my aspirations in life were a sealed book to him, as much as his peculiar religious experiences were to me.

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.

If you think you can do it, you can.

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

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

Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.

How many thorns of human nature are bristling conceits, buds of promise grown sharp for want of congenial climate.

He who marvels at the beauty of the world in summer will find equal cause for wonder and admiration in winter.

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

If America wishes to preserve her native birds, we must help supply what civilization has taken from them. The building of cities and towns, the cutting down of forests, and the draining of pools and swamps have deprived American birds of their original homes and food supply.

The trunk of a tree is like a community where only one generation at a time is engaged in active business, the great mass of the population being retired and adding solidity and permanence to the social organism.

Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness. Only man seems to be endowed with this faculty; he alone develops disinterested intelligence, intelligence that is not primarily concerned with his own safety and well-being but that looks abroad upon things.

The secret of happiness is something to do.

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

Without the name, any flower is still more or less a stranger to you. The name betrays its family, its relationship to other flowers, and gives the mind something tangible to grasp. It is very difficult for persons who have had no special training to learn the names of the flowers from the botany.

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.

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

My books are, in a way, a record of my life - that part of it that came to flower and fruit in my mind.

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.

One may return to the place of his birth, He cannot go back to his youth.

For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice

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.

A plump, well-fed stream is as satisfying to behold as a well-fed animal or a thrifty tree. One source of charm in the English landscape is the full, placid stream the season through; no desiccated watercourses will you see there, nor any feeble, decrepit brooks, hardly able to get over the ground.

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.

We talk of communing with Nature, but 'tis with ourselves we commune... Nature furnishes the conditions - the solitude - and the soul furnishes the entertainment.

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

That which distinguishes this day from all others is that then both orators and artillerymen shoot blank cartridges.

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

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.

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

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

Why, we have invented the whole machinery of the supernatural, with its unseen spirits and powers, good and bad, to account for things, because we found the universal everyday nature too cheap, too common, too vulgar.

The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.

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

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.

The naturist must see all things in the light of his experiences in this world.

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.

The smallest good deed is better than the grandest intention.

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

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

The homing instinct in birds and animals is one of their most remarkable traits: their strong local attachments and their skill in finding their way back when removed to a distance. It seems at times as if they possessed some extra sense - the home sense - which operates unerringly.

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

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.

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.

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

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