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" 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
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" The secret of happiness is something to do. "
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" 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. "
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" Emerson's fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during his lifetime by the books he gave to the world. "
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" If you think you can do it, you can. "
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" Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man. "
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" Living in the city is a discordant thing, an unnatural thing. The city, a place to which one goes to do business, is a place where men overreach each other in the fight for money. But it is not a place in which one can live. "
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" 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. "
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" A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else. "
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" To me, nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which it grows and lives: the fine, hair-like rootlets at the bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at the top. "
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" Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all - that has been my religion. "
John Burroughs
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" I went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth. "
John Burroughs
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" All birds are incipient or would-be songsters in the spring. I find corroborative evidence of this even in the crowing of the cock. "
John Burroughs
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" Even in rugged Scotland, nature is scarcely wilder than a mountain sheep, certainly a good way short of the ferity of the moose and caribou. "
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" 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. "
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Man
" When the woodpecker is searching for food, or laying siege to some hidden grub, the sound of his hammer is dead or muffled and is heard but a few yards. It is only upon dry, seasoned timber, freed of its bark, that he beats his reveille to spring and wooes his mate. "
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Searching
" In winter, the stars seem to have rekindled their fires, the moon achieves a fuller triumph, and the heavens wear a look of a more exalted simplicity. Summer is more wooing and seductive, more versatile and human, appeals to the affections and the sentiments, and fosters inquiry and the art impulse. "
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" To many forms of life of our northern lands, winter means a long sleep; to others, it means what it means to many fortunate human beings - travels in warm climes. To still others, who again have their human prototypes, it means a struggle, more or less fierce, to keep soul and body together; while to many insect forms, it means death. "
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Struggle
Together
" We talk of communing with Nature, but 'tis with ourselves we commune... Nature furnishes the conditions - the solitude - and the soul furnishes the entertainment. "
John Burroughs
Nature
Tis
Talk
" The naturist must see all things in the light of his experiences in this world. "
John Burroughs
Things
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Experiences
" 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. "
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" The red squirrel is more common and less dignified than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty larceny about the barns and grain-fields. "
John Burroughs
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" A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did. "
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" The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song. "
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Heart
" I have discovered the secret of happiness - it is work, either with the hands or the head. The moment I have something to do, the draughts are open and my chimney draws, and I am happy. "
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" The Nature Lover is not looking for mere facts but for meanings, for something he can translate into terms of his own life. "
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" 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. "
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Animal
" 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. "
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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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" We are beginning to see that money, after all, is not the main thing. The real values cannot be bought and sold. "
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" A man can get discouraged many times but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying. "
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Man