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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
Nature
Hints
Truth
Crude
Thing
Suggests
Much
Truths
Goes
Seen
Half
Translated
Facts
Absorbed

More quotes by John Burroughs

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Unfortunately, nuclear weapons have become identified with state power.
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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We can outrun the wind and the storm, but we cannot outrun the demon of hurry.
John Burroughs
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We cannot walk through life on mountain peaks.
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
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The art of nature is all in the direction of concealment.
John Burroughs
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Serene, I fold my hands and wait, Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea I rave no more 'gainst time or fate, For lo! my own shall come to me.
John Burroughs
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Nature will not be conquered, but gives herself freely to her true lover - to him who revels with her, bathes in her seas, sails her rivers, camps in her woods, and with no mercenary ends, accepts all.
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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Blessed is the man who has some congenial work, some occupation in which he can put his heart, and which affords a complete outlet to all the forces there are in him.
John Burroughs
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Life is a struggle, but not a warfare.
John Burroughs
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One may return to the place of his birth, He cannot go back to his youth.
John Burroughs
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The budget for nuclear forces in the United States is on the order of $25 billion or so. That includes warheads, delivery systems, command and control does not include environmental clean-up, which is another maybe $10 billion or so. So that's about 5% of the U.S. military budget.
John Burroughs
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Natural history is a matter of observation it is a harvest which you gather when and where you find it growing. Birds and squirrels and flowers are not always in season, but philosophy we have always with us. It is a crop which we can grow and reap at all times and in all places and it has its own value and brings its own satisfaction.
John Burroughs
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The bluebird enjoys the preeminence of being the first bit of color that cheers our northern landscape. The other birds that arrive about the same time--the sparrow, the robin, the phoebe-bird--are clad in neutral tints, gray, brown, or russet but the bluebird brings one of the primary hues and the divinest of them all.
John Burroughs
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He who marvels at the beauty of the world in summer will find equal cause for wonder and admiration in winter.
John Burroughs
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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 want nothing less than a faith founded upon a rock, faith in the constitution of things. The various man-made creeds are fictitious, like the constellations Orion, Cassiopeia’s Chair, the Big Dipper the only thing real in them is the stars, and the only thing real in the creeds is the soul’s aspiration toward the Infinite.
John Burroughs
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In the order of nature we may behold the ways of the Eternal.
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