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

More quotes by John Burroughs

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Unfortunately, nuclear weapons have become identified with state power.
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Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all - that has been my religion.
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I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.
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The secret of happiness is something to do.
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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.
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The longer I live, the more my mind dwells upon the beauty and the wonder of the world.
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Temperament lies behind mood behind will, lies the fate of character. Then behind both, the influence of family the tyranny of culture and finally the power of climate and environment and we are free, only to the extent we rise above these.
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.
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Then, again, how annoying to be told it is only five miles to the next place when it is really eight or ten!
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How much there is in books that one does not want to know, that it would be a mere weariness and burden to the spirit to know.
John Burroughs
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Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.
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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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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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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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If I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature.
John Burroughs
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Nature comes home to one most when one is at home. The stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also.
John Burroughs
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The God of the Puritans...was a monster too horrible to contemplate.
John Burroughs
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Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
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 lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is 'look under foot.' You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.
John Burroughs