Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years. – John Burroughs
To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another. – 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
A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else. – John Burroughs
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. – John Burroughs
Man has climbed up from some lower animal form, but he has, as it were, pulled the ladder up after him. – 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
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 sap run is the sweet goodbye of winter. It is the fruit of the equal marriage of the sun and frost. – John Burroughs
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! – John Burroughs
There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain that it is positively bad. – 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
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. – 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 went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth. – 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
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. – John Burroughs
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. – John Burroughs
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. – John Burroughs
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. – John Burroughs
As with other phases of nature, I have probably loved the rocks more than I have studied them. – 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
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
The Nature Lover is not looking for mere facts but for meanings, for something he can translate into terms of his own life. – John Burroughs
Sometimes I am worried by the thought of the effect that life in the city will have on coming generations. – John Burroughs