John Burroughs Quotes

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

The only countries that are outside of [ Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty] are Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea withdrew in the last few years.

Blessed is the man who has some congenial work, some occupation in which he can put his heart, and which affords a complete outlet to all the forces there are in him.

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

Literature is an investment of genius which pays dividends to all subsequent times.

I was born with a chronic anxiety about the weather.

Time does not become sacred to us until we have lived it.

It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.

One can only learn his powers of action by action, and his powers of thought by thinking

To see Earth fully we already need to love it

I am in love with this world. It has been my home. It has been my point of outlook into the universe. I have never bruised myself against it nor tried to use it ignobly.

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.

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

Life is a struggle, but not a warfare.

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

One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are the weeds.

[Invading Iraq] is not the best way to make a safer world in which the United States would be a responsible partner, but it also goes against the role of law in the United States.

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

There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain that it is positively bad.

One may summon his philosophy when they are beaten in battle, not till then.

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

We cannot walk through life on mountain peaks.

The life of nature we must meet halfway; it is shy, withdrawn, and blends itself with a vast neutral background.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.

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.

Nature comes home to one most when one is at home. The stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also.

Unfortunately, nuclear weapons have become identified with state power.

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

Science makes no claim to infallibility; it leaves that claim to be made by theologians.

Without death and decay, how could life go on?

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

Few persons realize how much of their happiness, such as it is, is dependent upon their work.

[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 U.S. had about 10,000 nuclear warheads. It is estimated that the U.S. is heading towards having 6,000 nuclear warheads in the year 2012.

The story goes on in the sense that at a most basic level, the United States ignored, that is violated, the United Nations charter when it invaded Iraq in 2003. This is not wise policy.

I came from a race of fishers; trout streams gurgled about the roots of my family tree.

You cannot use [nuclear weapons] to target civilians; you cannot use them against military targets if they have indiscriminate effects on civilians in addition to the attack on the military target.

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´.

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

The pleasure and value of every walk or journey we take may be doubled to us by carefully noting down the impressions it makes upon us.

One goes to Nature only for hints and half-truths. Her facts are crude until you have absorbed them or translated them ... It is not so much what we see as what the thing seen suggests.

How much there is in books that one does not want to know, that it would be a mere weariness and burden to the spirit to know.

In the order of nature we may behold the ways of the Eternal.

Every day is a Sabbath to me. All pure water is holy water, and this earth is a celestial abode.

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

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

The deeper our insight into the methods of nature . . . the more incredible the popular Christianity seems to us.

The atmosphere of our time is fast being cleared of the fumes and deadly gases that arose during the carboniferous age of theology.

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.

The overall quantity of nuclear weapons in the world continues to decline slowly.

We have produced some good walkers and saunterers, and some noted climbers; but as a staple recreation, as a daily practice, the mass of the people dislike and despise walking.