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" 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. "

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

John Burroughs

Science

Done

Civilization

" The art of the bird is to conceal its nest both as to position and as to material, but now and then it is betrayed into weaving into its structure showy and bizarre bits of this or that, which give its secret away and which seem to violate all the traditions of its kind. "

" Whitman was Emerson translated from the abstract into the concrete. "

" The naturist must see all things in the light of his experiences in this world. "

" Sometimes I am worried by the thought of the effect that life in the city will have on coming generations. "

John Burroughs

Sometimes

City

" 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. "

John Burroughs

Campaign

Life

" 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. "

" Emerson's fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during his lifetime by the books he gave to the world. "

" My books are, in a way, a record of my life - that part of it that came to flower and fruit in my mind. "

" If you think you can do it, you can. "

" Without the name, any flower is still more or less a stranger to you. The name betrays its family, its relationship to other flowers, and gives the mind something tangible to grasp. It is very difficult for persons who have had no special training to learn the names of the flowers from the botany. "

" I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter. "

" 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. "

" When Darwin published his conclusion that man was descended from an apelike ancestor who was again descended from a still lower type, most people were shocked by the thought; it was intensely repugnant to their feelings. "

" 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. "

" Emerson is the spokesman and prophet of youth and of a formative, idealistic age. His is a voice from the heights which are ever bathed in the sunshine of the spirit. I find that something one gets from Emerson in early life does not leave him when he grows old. "

" Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New England, and of English literature generally, as of another order. He is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer. "

John Burroughs

Order

Literature

" To strong, susceptible characters, the music of nature is not confined to sweet sounds. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Our flying squirrel is in no proper sense a flyer. On the ground, he is more helpless than a chipmunk, because less agile. He can only sail or slide down a steep incline from the top of one tree to the foot of another. "

" 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. "

John Burroughs

Mind

Leisure

" As with other phases of nature, I have probably loved the rocks more than I have studied them. "

John Burroughs

Nature

Rocks

" 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. "

" If America wishes to preserve her native birds, we must help supply what civilization has taken from them. The building of cities and towns, the cutting down of forests, and the draining of pools and swamps have deprived American birds of their original homes and food supply. "

" Why, we have invented the whole machinery of the supernatural, with its unseen spirits and powers, good and bad, to account for things, because we found the universal everyday nature too cheap, too common, too vulgar. "

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

John Burroughs

Born

Observation

" Leap, and the net will appear. "

" We are really here to be happy and to make others happy. "