John Burroughs Quotes

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.

Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.

If you haven't had at least a slight poetic crack in the heart, you have been cheated by nature.

If the picture speaks to me, if it tells me something about myself, then I want it. Then I have to have it.

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

I like to look at everything and appreciate seeing the different things that have meaning to people.

For all my life I have had a deep connection to the natural world.

It's super dope when you connect with something personally.

Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.

I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.

No, I only like whether I like the story or not, essentially see something in it that isn't completely there.

One of the things you'll discover... as you listen to your own soul is that you spend a great amount of your life trying to bring meaning to your own life. And, by the way, most people are not going to church, so the place they're actually trying to find meaning in their life is at work.

Music's something you feel. You have to feel it first before you hear it.

Great Art is Great because it inspired you greatly. If it didn't, no matter what the critics, the museums and the galleries say, it's not great art for you.

Poetry is that sentiment of the soul, or faculty of the mind, which enables its possessor to appreciate and realize the heights and depths of human experience. It is the power to feel pleasure or suffer pain in all its exquisiteness and intensity.

I have spent every New Year's Eve since 1992 in Lourdes. I spend the hour of my birth every year in the grotto. It's a place with meaning for me.

People relate to songs so differently. No matter what it's about in reality, people create their own meaning behind it and connect with it on their own terms.

Literature speaks with everyone individually - it is personal property that stays inside our heads. And nothing speaks to us as forcefully as a book, which expects nothing in return other than that we think and feel.

If I'm not moved from one spot to another, internally, while I'm witnessing it, reading it, consuming it, whatever, I don't know why we're being asked to the party.

If buying art is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what one might as well, and with no supernatural associations whatsoever, call our souls.

Individuals have to find a place to experience a profundity of feeling, and art is a means to that.

Music has influenced my life and is one of the most treasured things for me. It speaks a universal language and for me, it is extremely important to stay connected to it.

Art is freedom. If we don't have that element, we don't feel human anymore. Art is not decoration or a function. Before all that, art is art. This connection to meaning - our inner, intuitive knowledge - is something.