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One goes to Nature only for hints and half-truths. Her facts are crude until you have absorbed them or translated them ... It is not so much what we see as what the thing seen suggests.

John Burroughs

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John Burroughs
Age: 83 †
Born: 1837
Born: April 3
Died: 1921
Died: March 29
Essayist
Naturalist
Writer
Delaware County
New York
Seen
Half
Translated
Facts
Absorbed
Nature
Hints
Truth
Crude
Thing
Suggests
Much
Truths
Goes

More quotes by John Burroughs

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Certainly in the United States, you have a constituency in the form of the weapons laboratories, and you also have the branches of the armed services that are involved with nuclear weapons deployment, especially the naval submarine operations and also the air force's land-based ICBM operations. So they have a big lobby in Washington.
John Burroughs
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The deeper our insight into the methods of nature . . . the more incredible the popular Christianity seems to us.
John Burroughs
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The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.
John Burroughs
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Love is the measure of life only so far as we love do we really live.
John Burroughs
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[Theodore Roosevelt] was a naturalist on the broadest grounds, uniting much technical knowledge with knowledge of the daily lives and habits of all forms of wild life. He probably knew tenfold more natural history than all the presidents who had preceded him, and, I think one is safe in saying, more human history also.
John Burroughs
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Almost all of the governments have agreed that they will not acquire nuclear weapons and that they will allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor their commercial and research nuclear power operations to ensure that nuclear materials - highly enriched uranium and plutonium - are not diverted to use in weapons.
John Burroughs
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I go to books and to nature as a bee goes to the flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.
John Burroughs
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In what bold relief stand out the lives of all walkers of the snow! The snow is a great tell-tale, and blabs as effectually as it obliterates. I go into the woods, and know all that has happened. I cross the fields, and if only a mouse has visited his neighbor, the fact is chronicled.
John Burroughs
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What a severe yet master artist old Winter is... No longer the canvas and the pigments, but the marble and the chisel.
John Burroughs
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The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.
John Burroughs
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We can outrun the wind and the storm, but we cannot outrun the demon of hurry.
John Burroughs
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There is a condition or circumstance that has a greater bearing upon the happiness of life than any other. What is it? Something to do some congenial work. Take away the occupation of all people and what a wretched world it would be.
John Burroughs
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The life of nature we must meet halfway it is shy, withdrawn, and blends itself with a vast neutral background. We must be initiated it is an order the secrets of which are well guarded.
John Burroughs
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For two summers not a blue wing, not a blue warble. I seemed to miss something kindred and precious from my environment--the visible embodiment of the tender sky and wistful soil. What a loss, I said, to coming generations of dwellers in the country--no bluebird in spring!
John Burroughs
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A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
John Burroughs
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All sounds are sharper in winter the air transmits better. At night I hear more distinctly the steady roar of the North Mountain. In summer it is a sort of complacent purr, as the breezes stroke down its sides but in winter always the same low, sullen growl.
John Burroughs
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The five original nuclear weapon states I mentioned - U.S., Britain, France, China, and Russia - under the NPT have committed to the achievement of the elimination of their nuclear arsenals through good faith negotiations of nuclear disarmament - that's Article Six of the treaty.
John Burroughs
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Few persons realize how much of their happiness is dependent upon their work, upon the fact that they are busy and not left to feed upon themselves. Blessed is the person who has some congenial work, some occupation in which to place one's heart, and which affords a complete outlet to all the forces that are in him or her.
John Burroughs
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One can return to their place of birth, but one cannot go back to your youth.
John Burroughs
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Look up at the miracle of the falling snow,—the air a dizzy maze of whirling, eddying flakes, noiselessly transforming the world, the exquisite crystals dropping in ditch and gutter, and disguising in the same suit of spotless livery all objects upon which they fall.
John Burroughs