John Burroughs Quotes - Page 4

The art of nature is all in the direction of concealment.

Science makes no claim to infallibility; it leaves that claim to be made by theologians.

Life is a struggle, but not a warfare.

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.

That which distinguishes this day from all others is that then both orators and artillerymen shoot blank cartridges.

Now is the time of the illuminated woods ... when every leaf glows like a tiny lamp.

The thing that I focus on because I don't think it gets enough attention is that among the world's major powers, there is still a nuclear balance of terror - I'm talking about between the United States and Russia, the United States and China.

I was born with a chronic anxiety about the weather.

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.

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.

Look up at the miracle of the falling snow,—the air a dizzy maze of whirling, eddying flakes, noiselessly transforming the world, the exquisite crystals dropping in ditch and gutter, and disguising in the same suit of spotless livery all objects upon which they fall.

The simplicity of winter has a deep moral. The return of Nature, after such a career of splendor and prodigality, to habits so simple and austere, is not lost either upon the head or the heart. It is the philosopher coming back from the banquet and the wine to a cup of water and a crust of bread.

Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.

Man takes root at his feet, and at best he is no more than a potted plant in his house or carriage till he has established communication with the soil by the loving and magnetic touch of his soles to it.

Nature comes home to one most when one is at home. The stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also.

One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are the weeds.

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.

The gift of perfume to a flower is a special grace like genius or like beauty, and never becomes common or cheap.

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.

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.

[T]he cold warms me—after a different fashion from that of the kitchen stove.

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.

In 2002 the [George] Bush administration effectively put an end to negotiations of an agreement which would have established inspection procedures to ensure or to monitor compliance with the existing legal ban on biological weapons.

The U.S. had about 10,000 nuclear warheads. It is estimated that the U.S. is heading towards having 6,000 nuclear warheads in the year 2012.

Culture means the perfect and equal development of man on all sides.