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" The pond-lily is a star and easily takes the first place among lilies; and the expeditions to her haunts, and the gathering her where she rocks upon the dark, secluded waters of some pool or lakelet, are the crown and summit of the floral expeditions of summer. "

John Burroughs

Dark

Crown

Place

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" You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. "

" Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature. "

" I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral. "

John Burroughs

Feeling

History

" It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life because it takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation. "

John Burroughs

Wonder

Natural

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

" To regard the soul and body as one, or to ascribe to consciousness a physiological origin, is not detracting from its divinity; it is rather conferring divinity upon the body. "

" 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

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

John Burroughs

Born

Observation

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. "

" My motto is never to try to imitate anybody: I have always looked inward and followed the inward voice. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" England is like the margin of a spring-run: near its source, always green, always cool, always moist, comparatively free from frost in winter and from drought in summer. "

John Burroughs

Cool

Winter

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Nearly every season, I make the acquaintance of one or more new flowers. It takes years to exhaust the botanical treasures of any one considerable neighborhood, unless one makes a dead set at it, like an herbalist. "

" Fear, love, and hunger were the agents that developed the wits of the lower animals, as they were, of course, the prime factors in developing the intelligence of man. "

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

John Burroughs

Fail

Man

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

" A man can get discouraged many times but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying. "