John Burroughs

“Father knew me not. All my aspirations in life were a sealed book to him, as much as his peculiar religious experiences were to me.”

“You can fail many times, but you're not a failure until you begin to blame somebody else.”

“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.”

“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.”

“How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.”

“In October, a maple tree before your window lights up your room like a great lamp. Even on cloudy days, its presence helps to dispel the gloom.”

“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.”

“Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all - that has been my religion.”

“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.”

“If you think you can do it, you can.”

“I went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth.”

“Emerson was such an important figure in our literary history, and in the moral and religious development of our people, that attention cannot be directed to him too often.”

“Man has climbed up from some lower animal form, but he has, as it were, pulled the ladder up after him.”

“If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.”

“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.”

“Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.”

“The life of a swarm of bees is like an active and hazardous campaign of an army: the ranks are being continually depleted and continually recruited.”