Quotes from John Burroughs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

One of the most graceful of warriors is the robin. I know few prettier sights than two males challenging and curveting about each other upon the grass in early spring. Their attentions to each other are so courteous and restrained.

The fuel in the earth will be exhausted in a thousand or more years, and its mineral wealth, but man will find substitutes for these in the winds, the waves, the sun's heat, and so forth.

Culture means the perfect and equal development of man on all sides.

Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.

The longer I live, the more my mind dwells upon the beauty and the wonder of the world.

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

I go to books and to nature as a bee goes to the flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.

If I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature.

Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.

The place to observe nature is where you are.

Close scrutiny of an object in nature will nearly always yield some significant fact.

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

The God of the Puritans...was a monster too horrible to contemplate.

When I look up into the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is I really see there, I am constrained to say, ´there is no god´.

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

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