John Burroughs Quotes (65 Quotes)

The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.

I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.

It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.

If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.

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.

The secret of happiness is something to do.

One may summon his philosophy when they are beaten in battle, not till then.

Blessed is the man who has some congenial work, some occupation in which he can put his heart, and which affords a complete outlet to all the forces there are in him.

The atmosphere of our time is fast being cleared of the fumes and deadly gases that arose during the carboniferous age of theology.

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.

To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday.

How many thorns of human nature hard, sharp, lifeless protuberances that tear and wound us, narrow prejudices, bristling conceits that repel and disgust us are arrested developments, calcified tendencies, buds of promise that should have lifted a branch up into the sunny day with fruit and flowers to delight the heart of men, but now all grown hard, petrified, for want of culture and a congenial soil and climate.

Happiness comes most to persons who seek her least, and think least about it. It is not an object to be sought it is a state to be induced. It must follow and not lead. It must overtake you, and not you overtake it.

Time does not become sacred to us until we have lived it.

One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in this life and one that many persons never learn, is to see the divine, the celestial, the pure, in the common, the near at hand to see that heaven lies about us here in this world.