John Burroughs: Quotes about nature

John Burroughs was American naturalist and essayist. Explore interesting quotes on nature.
John Burroughs: 82   quotes 1   like

“If I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature….”

John Burroughs
Life , Books , Nature

“I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.”

John Burroughs

Source: The Summit of the Years

Books , Flowers , Nature , Bee

“It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative; it is not till the second or third thought that doubt begins. Belief is so vital and necessary that one would say the tendency was made strong at the perpetual risk of extra belief and superstition; it were better to believe too much than not enough. Hence mankind have always believed too much, as if to make sure that the anchor hold. To believe just enough, to free his mind from all cant and from all illusion, and see things just as in themselves they are, is the aim of the philosopher or of the true skeptic.”

John Burroughs

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. VII: The Modern Skeptic

Nature , Strong

“When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is that I really see there, I am constrained to say, "There is no God." The mind staggers in its attempt to grasp the idea of a being that could do that. It is futile to attempt it. It is not the works of some God that I see there. I am face to face with a power that baffles speech. I see no lineaments of personality, no human traits, but an energy upon whose currents solar systems are but bubbles. In the presence of it man and the race of man are less than motes in the air. I doubt if any mind can expand its conception of God sufficiently to meet the astounding disclosures of modern science. It is easier to say there is no God. The universe is so unhuman, that is, it goes its way with so little thought of man. He is but an incident, not an end. We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things are not shaped to him, but that he is shaped to them. The air was not made for his lungs, but he has lungs because there is air; the light was not created for his eye, but he has eyes because there is light. All the forces of nature are going their own way; man avails himself of them, or catches a ride as best he can. If he keeps his seat he prospers; if he misses his hold and falls he is crushed.”

John Burroughs

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. XII: God and Nature

God , Way , Idea , Nature

“But we must learn it sooner or later. There surely comes a time when the mind perceives that this world is the work of God also and not of devils, and that in the order of nature we may behold the ways of the Eternal; in fact, that God is here and now in the humblest and most familiar fact, as sleepless and active as ever he was in old Judea. This perception has come and is coming to more minds to-day than ever before--this perception of the modernness of God, of the modernness of inspiration, of the modernness of religion; that there was never any more revelation than there is now, never any more conversing of God with man, never any more Garden of Eden, or fall of Adam, or thunder of Sinai, or ministering angels, than there is now; in fact, that these things are not historical events, but inward experiences and perceptions perpetually renewed or typified in the growth of the race. This is the modern gospel; this is the one vital and formative religious thought of modern times.”

John Burroughs

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. IV: Natural Versus Supernatural

God , World , Religion , Angels

“All political progress has been the removal of forced and artificial relations among men, and the establishment of natural relations. Democracy is a search for natural leaders and the rights and privileges that belong to man by virtue of his manhood.”

John Burroughs

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. II: From the Artificial to the Natural

Men , Democracy , Search , Nature

“The deeper our insight into the methods of nature... the more incredible the popular Christianity seems to us.”

John Burroughs

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. IV: Natural Versus Supernatural

Nature

“The truths of naturalism do not satisfy the moral and religious nature.”

John Burroughs

Source: Accepting the Universe (1920), p.301

Truth , Nature

“Man’s craving for the supernatural is as natural as our discounting of the present moment… The natural becomes trite and commonplace to us and we take refuge in an imaginary world above and beyond it.”

John Burroughs

Source: Accepting the Universe (1920), p.261

World , Nature

“From the first the progress of man has been slowly but surely from the artificial to the natural, from the arbitrary and chimerical to the simple and scientific. Getting himself and his affairs more and more into natural currents and following them, this is the way man has progressed.”

John Burroughs

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. II: From the Artificial to the Natural

Way , Nature