John Burroughs

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Whitman was Emerson translated from the abstract into the concrete.”

“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.”

“As life nears its end with me, I find myself meditating more and more upon the mystery of its nature and origin, yet without the least hope that I can find out the ways of the Eternal in this or in any other world.”

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

“The animal world seizes its food in masses little and big, and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable, through the agency of the solvent power of water, absorbs its nourishment molecule by molecule.”

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

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

“The Nature Lover is not looking for mere facts but for meanings, for something he can translate into terms of his own life.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“The secret of happiness is something to do.”

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