Quotes by John Burroughs - Page 6

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 seems to be capable of a sort of rudimentary flying, at least of making itself into a parachute, so as to ease or break a fall or a leap from a great height.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Break
Capable
Ease
Fall
Flying
Height
Injury
Leap
Reason
Reckless
Seems
Species
Squirrels
Why
Miss
Bold
Itself
Doubtless
Hold
Least
Making
Parachute
Rudimentary
Sustain
Trees
Copy Quote
Mounting toward the upland again, I pause reverently, as the hush and stillness of twilight come upon the woods. It is the sweetest, ripest hour of the day. And as the hermit's evening hymn goes up from the deep solitude below me, I experience that serene exaltation of sentiment of which music, literature, and religion are but the faint types and symbols.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Hymns
Solitude
Twilight
Copy Quote
IT is reported of Margaret Fuller that she said she accepted the universe. "Gad, she'd better!" retorted Carlyle. Carlyle himself did not accept the universe in a very whole-hearted manner. Looking up at the midnight stars, he exclaimed: "A sad spectacle! If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly; if they be not inhabited, what a waste of space!"
John Burroughs / Essayist
Science
Sadness
Stars
Copy Quote
The court was unable to rule on all circumstances in which nuclear weapons might be used, and it said in view of the problems, the risks posed by nuclear weapons, and in view of the lack of certainty of the law in all circumstances, the best course is fulfilling the obligation of good faith negotiations of nuclear disarmament contained in the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Law
Nuclear Disarmament
Views
Copy Quote
Basically [United States and France] said "We will use nuclear weapons whenever it suits our purposes to do so." So this expansion of doctrines regarding possible use of nuclear weapons makes them more, you know, sort of, salient and important and so it's increasing the perceived political value of nuclear weapons and therefore causing or contributing to possible proliferation.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Expansion
Important
Political
Copy Quote
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense his life. . . . The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds - how many human aspirations are realised in their free, holiday-lives - and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!
John Burroughs / Essayist
Nature
Beautiful
Song
Copy Quote
Communing with God is communing with our own hearts, our own best selves, not with something foreign and accidental. Saints and devotees have gone into the wilderness to find God; of course they took God with them, and the silence and detachment enabled them to hear the still, small voice of their own souls, as one hears the ticking of his own watch in the stillness of the night.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Heart
Night
Self
Copy Quote
The commitment to international agreements is embodied, it's found in the U.S. Constitution. Article Six of the U.S. Constitution provides that treaties of the United States are part of the supreme law of the land along with the constitution itself and laws passed by Congress. Well, the US government certainly has not been acting in recent years as if treaties were part of the supreme law of the land.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Commitment
Land
Law
Copy Quote
Following World War II, the U.S. was the architect of the UN system, and the world financial system, and the Human Rights Declaration, and of course the United Nations is based here in New York City. But, unfortunately, especially in the last decade, the U.S. really has been turning its back on international agreements and the set of agencies and procedures that they create as a means for governing the world.
John Burroughs / Essayist
New York
War
Mean
Copy Quote
How many thorns of human nature - hard, sharp, lifeless protuberances that tear and wound us, narrow prejudices, bristling conceits that repel and disgust us - are arrested developments, calcified tendencies, buds of promise that should have lifted a branch up into the sunny day with fruit; and flowers to delight the heart of men, but now all grown hard, petrified, for want of culture and a congenial soil and climate.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Men
Flower
Heart
Copy Quote
Maybe that will happen with other countries as well. And so, that's why one of the things that groups like mine that work for the elimination of nuclear weapons and work for their marginalization in the meantime, we say you have to diminish the political value that's attached to nuclear weapons in order to give them less (kind of) desirability in the eyes of governments that do not now have them, and thus to help stop their spread.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Government
Country
Eye
Copy Quote
The rocks have a history; gray and weatherworn, they are veterans of many battles; they have most of them marched in the ranks of vast stone brigades during the ice age; they have been torn from the hills, recruited from the mountaintops, and marshaled on the plains and in the valleys; and now the elemental war is over, there they lie waging a gentle but incessant warfare with time and slowly, oh, so slowly, yielding to its attacks!
John Burroughs / Essayist
Science
War
Lying
Copy Quote
The United States says "We're complying. We're following the disarmament obligation. Look at the quantitative reductions that are taking place." But, since '96, there really hasn't been progress on specific commitments that have been made. Perhaps most disturbing is this: that the United States and France in particular, since 1996, have expanded the range of circumstances under which they might use - they say they might use - nuclear weapons.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Commitment
Might Use
Progress
Copy Quote
So the idea about how detonation of a nuclear weapon might happen vary, you know - some people are especially concerned about terrorists getting their hands on nuclear weapons and using them. Some people are worried that there might be a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Some think the Middle East, were Israel already has nuclear weapons and where other countries may be interested at some point and acquiring them, might be a flash point.
John Burroughs / Essayist
War
Country
Thinking
Copy Quote
One summer day, while I was walking along the country road on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down. Amid the general stillness and immobility about me the effect was quite startling. ... It was the sudden summing up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the material of the wall. A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Country
Summer
Wall
Copy Quote
I do not think I exaggerate the importance or the charms of pedestrianism, or our need as a people to cultivate the art. I think it would tend to soften the national manners, to teach us the meaning of leisure, to acquaint us with the charms of the open air, to strengthen and foster the tie between the race and the land. No one else looks out upon the world so kindly and charitably as the pedestrian; no one else gives and takes so much from the country he passes through.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Art
Country
Thinking
Copy Quote
Science is a capital or fund perpetually reinvested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward by every new man. Every man of science has all the science before him to go upon, to set himself up in business with. What an enormous sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested! Not so in literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a fund to be reinvested as it is a crop to be ever new-grown.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Art
Men
Science
Copy Quote
The sunbeams are welcome now. They seem like pure electricity—like friendly and recuperating lightning. Are we led to think electricity abounds only in summer, when we see in the storm-clouds as it were, the veins and ore-beds of it? I imagine it is equally abundant in winter, and more equable and better tempered. Who ever breasted a snowstorm without being excited and exhilarated, as if this meteor had come charged with latent auroræ of the North, as doubtless it has? It is like being pelted with sparks from a battery.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Summer
Thinking
Winter
Copy Quote
The fisherman has a harmless, preoccupied look; he is a kind of vagrant, that nothing fears. He blends himself with the trees and the shadows. All his approaches are gentle and indirect. He times himself to the meandering, soliloquizing stream; he addresses himself to it as a lover to his mistress; he woos it and stays with it till he knows its hidden secrets. Where it deepens his purpose deepens; where it is shallow he is indifferent. He knows how to interpret its every glance and dimple; its beauty haunts him for days.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Fishing
Rivers
Sea
Copy Quote
There tends to be this comfortable assumption that nuclear weapons won't be used, but I don't think that's warranted, and I think we should seize the opportunity of this time of stability and cooperation and move towards global elimination of nuclear weapons as indeed people like Henry Kissinger, and William Perry, former Secretary of Defense under Clinton, and Sam Nunn, former Senator, and George Schultz, former Undersecretary of State for Ronald Reagan. All of them recently called for achievement of a nuclear weapon-free world.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Opportunity
Moving
Thinking
Copy Quote
Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth. There are no heretics in Nature's church; all are believers, all are communicants. The beauty of natural religion is that you have it all the time; you do not have to seek it afar off in myths and legends, in catacombs, in garbled texts, in miracles of dead saints or wine-bibbing friars. It is of today; it is now and here; it is everywhere.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Heart
Mother
Religious
Copy Quote
I see on a immense scale, and as clearly as in a demonstration in a laboratory, that good comes out of evil; that the impartiality of the Nature Providence is best; that we are made strong by what we overcome; that man is man because he is as free to do evil as to do good; that life is as free to develop hostile forms as to develop friendly; that power waits upon him who earns it; that disease, wars, the unloosened, devastating elemental forces have each and all played their part in developing and hardening man and giving him the heroic fiber.
John Burroughs / Essayist
Life
War
Strong
Copy Quote

Related Essayist Authors

William Temple
Essayist
Tuesday, Apr 25, 1628
Tuesday, Jan 27, 1699
William Rathbone Greg
Essayist

Tuesday, Nov 15, 1881
William George Jordan
Essayist
Sunday, Mar 06, 1864
Wendy C. Ortiz
Essayist
Wednesday, May 16, 1973
Vicesimus Knox
Essayist
Umberto Eco
Essayist
Tuesday, Jan 05, 1932
Friday, Feb 19, 2016
Thomas De Quincey
Essayist
Monday, Aug 15, 1785
Thursday, Dec 08, 1859
Sven Birkerts
Essayist
Friday, Sep 21, 1951
Scott Bradfield
Essayist
Wednesday, Apr 27, 1955
Samuel Mcchord Crothers
Essayist
Sunday, Jun 07, 1857
Roger Angell
Essayist
Sunday, Sep 19, 1920

View All Essayist Quotes

Top Authors

Pope Francis
Thursday, Dec 17, 1936
Deepak Chopra
Author
Wednesday, Oct 22, 1947
Marcus Aurelius
Roman Emperor
Saturday, Apr 26, 0121
Friday, Mar 17, 0180
George Orwell
Novelist
Thursday, Jun 25, 1903
Saturday, Jan 21, 1950
Nelson Mandela
Former President Of South Africa
Thursday, Jul 18, 1918
Thursday, Dec 05, 2013
Pope John Paul Ii
Priest
Tuesday, May 18, 1920
Saturday, Apr 02, 2005
Kobe Bryant
Basketball Player
Wednesday, Aug 23, 1978
Groucho Marx
Comedian
Thursday, Oct 02, 1890
Friday, Aug 19, 1977
Benjamin Franklin
Founding Father Of The United States
Sunday, Jan 17, 1706
Saturday, Apr 17, 1790
Isaac Newton
Physicist
Sunday, Jan 04, 1643
Monday, Mar 31, 1727
Oscar Wilde
Writer
Monday, Oct 16, 1854
Friday, Nov 30, 1900
Ernest Hemingway
Author
Friday, Jul 21, 1899
Sunday, Jul 02, 1961
Billy Graham
Professional Wrestler
Monday, Jun 07, 1943
Peter Drucker
Author
Friday, Nov 19, 1909
Friday, Nov 11, 2005
Dr. Seuss
Writer
Wednesday, Mar 02, 1904
Tuesday, Sep 24, 1991

View All Authors

John Burroughs Quotes - Page 6

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Essayist Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Essayist Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page