John Burroughs Quotes

I think rain is as necessary to the mind as to vegetation. My very thoughts become thirsty, and crave the moisture.

Oh, Spring is surely coming, Her couriers fill the air; Each morn are new arrivals, Each night her ways prepare; I scent her fragrant garments, Her foot is on the stair.

You cannot cause disproportionate damage to the environment; you cannot harm neutral states. The court said that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is generally contrary to the international law of armed conflict.

I am in love with this world . . . I have climbed its mountains, roamed its forests, sailed its waters, crossed its deserts, felt the sting of its frosts, the oppression of its heats, the drench of its rains, the fury of its winds, and always have beauty and joy waited upon my goings and comings.

The life of nature we must meet halfway; it is shy, withdrawn, and blends itself with a vast neutral background. We must be initiated; it is an order the secrets of which are well guarded.

In the printed page the only real things are the paper and the ink; the white spaces play the same part in aiding the eye to take in the meaning of the print as do the black letters.

A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did.

I still find each day too short.

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

The five original nuclear weapon states I mentioned - U.S., Britain, France, China, and Russia - under the NPT have committed to the achievement of the elimination of their nuclear arsenals through good faith negotiations of nuclear disarmament - that's Article Six of the treaty.

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.

When nature made the blue-bird she wished to propitiate both the sky and the earth, so she gave him the color of the one on his back and the hue of the other on his breast.

Communing with God is communing with our own hearts, our own best selves, not with something foreign and accidental. Saints and devotees have gone into the wilderness to find God; of course they took God with them, and the silence and detachment enabled them to hear the still, small voice of their own souls, as one hears the ticking of his own watch in the stillness of the night.

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

Unfortunately, nuclear weapons have become identified with state power.

Maybe that will happen with other countries as well. And so, that's why one of the things that groups like mine that work for the elimination of nuclear weapons and work for their marginalization in the meantime, we say you have to diminish the political value that's attached to nuclear weapons in order to give them less (kind of) desirability in the eyes of governments that do not now have them, and thus to help stop their spread.

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.

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 cannot walk through life on mountain peaks.

IT is reported of Margaret Fuller that she said she accepted the universe. "Gad, she'd better!" retorted Carlyle. Carlyle himself did not accept the universe in a very whole-hearted manner. Looking up at the midnight stars, he exclaimed: "A sad spectacle! If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly; if they be not inhabited, what a waste of space!"

Mounting toward the upland again, I pause reverently, as the hush and stillness of twilight come upon the woods. It is the sweetest, ripest hour of the day. And as the hermit's evening hymn goes up from the deep solitude below me, I experience that serene exaltation of sentiment of which music, literature, and religion are but the faint types and symbols.

Temperament lies behind mood; behind will, lies the fate of character. Then behind both, the influence of family the tyranny of culture; and finally the power of climate and environment; and we are free, only to the extent we rise above these.

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

We've been in a period of relative stability and cooperation since the end of the Cold War among the world's major powers, but that may not always exist. And certainly one could even predict that there will be periods of hostility or tension ahead.

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. There are no heretics in Nature's church; all are believers, all are communicants. The beauty of natural religion is that you have it all the time; you do not have to seek it afar off in myths and legends, in catacombs, in garbled texts, in miracles of dead saints or wine-bibbing friars. It is of today; it is now and here; it is everywhere.

We can outrun the wind and the storm, but we cannot outrun the demon of hurry.

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.

Now is the time of the illuminated woods ... when every leaf glows like a tiny lamp.

The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense his life. . . . The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds - how many human aspirations are realised in their free, holiday-lives - and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!

The commitment to international agreements is embodied, it's found in the U.S. Constitution. Article Six of the U.S. Constitution provides that treaties of the United States are part of the supreme law of the land along with the constitution itself and laws passed by Congress. Well, the US government certainly has not been acting in recent years as if treaties were part of the supreme law of the land.

Science is a capital or fund perpetually reinvested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward by every new man. Every man of science has all the science before him to go upon, to set himself up in business with. What an enormous sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested! Not so in literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a fund to be reinvested as it is a crop to be ever new-grown.

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

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

There tends to be this comfortable assumption that nuclear weapons won't be used, but I don't think that's warranted, and I think we should seize the opportunity of this time of stability and cooperation and move towards global elimination of nuclear weapons as indeed people like Henry Kissinger, and William Perry, former Secretary of Defense under Clinton, and Sam Nunn, former Senator, and George Schultz, former Undersecretary of State for Ronald Reagan. All of them recently called for achievement of a nuclear weapon-free world.

[Nuclear weapons] now I think I mentioned around 27,000 and during the Cold War the total global arsenal was on the order of 70,000.

The art of nature is all in the direction of concealment.

Certainly in the United States, you have a constituency in the form of the weapons laboratories, and you also have the branches of the armed services that are involved with nuclear weapons deployment, especially the naval submarine operations and also the air force's land-based ICBM operations. So they have a big lobby in Washington.

The place to observe nature is where you are.

The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is 'look under foot.' You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.

If the October days were a cordial like the sub-acids of fruit, these are a tonic like the wine of iron. Drink deep or be careful how you taste this December vintage. The first sip may chill, but a full draught warms and invigorates.

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.

To see Earth fully we already need to love it

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

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

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.

Few persons realize how much of their happiness is dependent upon their work, upon the fact that they are busy and not left to feed upon themselves. Blessed is the person who has some congenial work, some occupation in which to place one's heart, and which affords a complete outlet to all the forces that are in him or her.

One can return to their place of birth, but one cannot go back to your youth.

Then, again, how annoying to be told it is only five miles to the next place when it is really eight or ten!