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" My life has been a fortunate one; I was born under a lucky star. It seems as if both wind and tide had favoured me. I have suffered no great losses, or defeats, or illness, or accidents, and have undergone no great struggles or privations; I have had no grouch. I have not wanted the earth. "

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" 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. "

John Burroughs

Moral

Stone

Spark

" For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice - no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service. "

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

" The country is more of a wilderness, more of a wild solitude, in the winter than in the summer. The wild comes out. The urban, the cultivated, is hidden or negatived. "

" 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. "

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

John Burroughs

Others

Nails

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

" A sap run is the sweet goodbye of winter. It is the fruit of the equal marriage of the sun and frost. "

" The phoebe-bird is a wise architect and perhaps enjoys as great an immunity from danger, both in its person and its nest, as any other bird. Its modest ashen-gray suit is the color of the rocks where it builds, and the moss of which it makes such free use gives to its nest the look of a natural growth or accretion. "

" The homing instinct in birds and animals is one of their most remarkable traits: their strong local attachments and their skill in finding their way back when removed to a distance. It seems at times as if they possessed some extra sense - the home sense - which operates unerringly. "

" If one gains an interest in the history of the earth, he is quite sure to gain an interest in the history of the life on the earth. If the former illustrates the theory of development, so must the latter. The geologist is pretty sure to be an evolutionist. "

" England is not a country of granite and marble, but of chalk, marl, and clay. "

" Life is a struggle, but not a warfare. "

" We now use the word 'nature' very much as our fathers used the word 'God.' "

" 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. "

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

" No one else looks out upon the world so kindly and charitably as the pedestrian; no one else gives and takes so much from the country he passes through. "

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

John Burroughs

Alone

Fast

" 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. "

John Burroughs

Taste

Him

" Most birds are very stiff-necked, like the robin, and as they run or hop upon the ground, carry the head as if it were riveted to the body. Not so the oven-bird, or the other birds that walk, as the cow-bunting, or the quail, or the crow. They move the head forward with the movement of the feet. "

" To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Some scenes you juggle two balls, some scenes you juggle three balls, some scenes you can juggle five balls. The key is always to speak in your own voice. Speak the truth. That's Acting 101. Then you start putting layers on top of that. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Robin is one of the most native and democratic of our birds; he is one of the family, and seems much nearer to us than those rare, exotic visitants, as the orchard starling or rose-breasted grossbeak, with their distant, high-bred ways. "

John Burroughs

Family

Birds

" A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else. "

John Burroughs

Fail

Man