John Burroughs Quotes

Nature tells every secret once.

And finally Winter, with its bitin', whinin' wind, and all the land will be mantled with snow.

I look at trees, hunt mushrooms, and watch animals. Fishing is what gets me out into the woods so I can notice these things.

A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.

It is the nature of truth to struggle to the light.

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

I have always thought that by observing things with a great deal of attention you eventually wrest some of their secrets from them, making them utter what they would most like to keep to themselves.

Earth has few secrets from the birds.

Perhaps of all our untamed quadrupeds, the fox has obtained the widest and most familiar reputation.... His recent tracks still give variety to a winter's walk. I tread in the steps of the fox that has gone before me by some hours, or which perhaps I have started, with such a tip-toe of expectation as if I were on the trail of the Spirit itself which resides in the wood, and expected soon to catch it in its lair.

Since nothing is so secret or hidden that it cannot be revealed, everything depends on the discovery of those things that manifest the hidden.

One of the best gifts you can give a poet is to present them with field guides - to rocks, to stars, to birds, to wildflowers, to trees and bushes, to butterflies, to reptiles and amphibians. Because when you look at anything long enough to be able to identify it, you see far more clearly and you make a tiny beginning at understanding the life, the place, the history of that bird or rock or mammal.

In the woods where snow is thick, bars of sunlight lay like pale fire.

We discover a new world every time we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow.

One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.

How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers The buck in the snow . . . Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.

Nature does not reveal all her secrets at once. We imagine we are initiated in her mysteries: we are, as yet, but hanging around her outer courts.

What is the world, O soldiers? It is I, I, this incessant snow, This northern sky.

Water is the one substance from which the earth can conceal nothing; it sucks out its innermost secrets and brings them to our very lips.

Close scrutiny of an object in nature will nearly always yield some significant fact.

Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.

Mysterious in the light of day, nature retains her veil, despite our clamours: That which she does not willingly display cannot be wrenched from her with levers, screws and hammers.

They say they have noticed me drawing. I almost tell them right then and there. They noticed.