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John Burroughs


American
April 3, 1837
Author
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Whitman was Emerson translated from the abstract into the concrete.


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


John Burroughs
Tags: You Something New
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We are really here to be happy and to make others happy.


John Burroughs
Tags: Really Make Here
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I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.


John Burroughs
Tags: Nature Go Put
Wisdom cannot come by railroad or automobile or aeroplane, or be hurried up by telegraph or telephone.
John Burroughs
Tags: Up Come Cannot
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We now use the word 'nature' very much as our fathers used the word 'God.'


John Burroughs
Tags: God Nature Very
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You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.


John Burroughs
Tags: Power You Think
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A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.


John Burroughs
Tags: Failure He Many
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Some men are like nails, very easily drawn; others however are more like rivets never drawn at all.


John Burroughs
Tags: Men Like More
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
John Burroughs
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There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain that it is positively bad.


John Burroughs
Tags: Who Will He
Man has climbed up from some lower animal form, but he has, as it were, pulled the ladder up after him.
John Burroughs
Tags: Up He Some
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
John Burroughs
Tags: Science More Than
The human body is a steed that goes freest and longest under a light rider, and the lightest of all riders is a cheerful heart.
John Burroughs
Tags: Human Heart Body
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
Tags: Failure Get He
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.
John Burroughs
Tags: Life Am I Am
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
Tags: Me Because Out
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
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
Tags: Think Want See
Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.
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
Tags: Like More Make
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.
John Burroughs
Tags: People Who Most
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
Tags: He Other New
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.
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
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
Tags: Truth You Always
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
Tags: Some Where First
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
Tags: Me Been Am
More than any other poet, Whitman is what we make him; more than any other poet, his greatest value is in what he suggests and implies rather than in what he portrays, and more than any other poet must he wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of himself.
John Burroughs
Tags: More Than Make
I have thought that a good test of civilization, perhaps one of the best, is country life. Where country life is safe and enjoyable, where many of the conveniences and appliances of the town are joined to the large freedom and large benefits of the country, a high state of civilization prevails.
John Burroughs
Tags: Good Best Freedom
The type of mind of Whitman's, which seldom or never emerges as a mere mentality, an independent thinking and knowing faculty, but always as a personality, always as a complete human entity, never can expound itself, because its operations are synthetic and not analytic; its mainspring is love and not mere knowledge.
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
Tags: Anger Would Never
I crave and seek a natural explanation of all phenomena upon this earth, but the word 'natural' to me implies more than mere chemistry and physics. The birth of a baby and the blooming of a flower are natural events, but the laboratory methods forever fail to give us the key to the secret of either.
John Burroughs
Tags: Me More Than
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
Tags: Great Which Other