John Burroughs Quotes on Nature (4 Quotes)

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.

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.

Nature comes home to one most when he is at home the stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also. One's own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part of himself he has sowed himself broadcast upon it, and it reflects his own moods and feelings he is sensitive to the verge of the horizon cut those trees, and he bleeds mar those hills, and he suffers. How has the farmer planted himself in his fields builded himself into his stone walls, and evoked the sympathy of the hills by his struggle This home feeling, this domestication of nature, is important to the observer. This is the birdlime with which he catches the bird this is the private door that admits him behind the scenes.

If I were to name the 3 most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature and the greatest of these, at least the most constant and always at hand, is nature.