John Burroughs

“Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness. Only man seems to be endowed with this faculty; he alone develops disinterested i...”

“The love of nature is a different thing from the love of science, though the two may go together.”

“The red squirrel is more common and less dignified than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty larceny about the barns and grain-fields.”

“Emerson was such an important figure in our literary history, and in the moral and religious development of our people, that attention cannot be directed to him too often.”

“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...”

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

“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...”

“I went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth.”

“One reason, doubtless, why squirrels are so bold and reckless in leaping through the trees is that, if they miss their hold and fall, they sustain no injury. Every species of tree-squirrel s...”

“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,...”

“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 o...”

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

“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 elat...”

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

“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...”

“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...”

“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 mu...”

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

“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 che...”

“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.”