Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
John Burroughs
Age: 83 †
Born: 1837
Born: April 3
Died: 1921
Died: March 29
Essayist
Naturalist
Writer
Delaware County
New York
Reading
Spirit
Doe
Book
Much
Weariness
Would
Burden
Mere
Books
More quotes by John Burroughs
Nature exists for man no more than she does for monkeys, and is as regardless of his life or pleasure or success as she is of the fleas. Her waves will drown him, her fire burn him, and her earth devour him, her storms and lightning smite him, as if he were only a dog.
John Burroughs
Few persons realize how much of their happiness, such as it is, is dependent upon their work.
John Burroughs
There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain that it is positively bad.
John Burroughs
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
I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.
John Burroughs
Without death and decay, how could life go on?
John Burroughs
I have discovered the secret of happiness - it is work, either with the hands or the head. The moment I have something to do, the draughts are open and my chimney draws, and I am happy.
John Burroughs
The honey-bee's great ambition is to be rich, to lay up great stores, to possess the sweet of every flower that blooms. She is more than provident. Enough will not satisfy her, she must have all she can get by hook or crook.
John Burroughs
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
The story goes on in the sense that at a most basic level, the United States ignored, that is violated, the United Nations charter when it invaded Iraq in 2003. This is not wise policy.
John Burroughs
Time does not become sacred to us until we have lived it.
John Burroughs
I still find each day too short.
John Burroughs
The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.
John Burroughs
You cannot cause disproportionate damage to the environment you cannot harm neutral states. The court said that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is generally contrary to the international law of armed conflict.
John Burroughs
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
[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
Oh, Spring is surely coming, Her couriers fill the air Each morn are new arrivals, Each night her ways prepare I scent her fragrant garments, Her foot is on the stair.
John Burroughs
Now is the time of the illuminated woods ... when every leaf glows like a tiny lamp.
John Burroughs
I think rain is as necessary to the mind as to vegetation. My very thoughts become thirsty, and crave the moisture.
John Burroughs
Love is the measure of life only so far as we love do we really live.
John Burroughs
