John Burroughs
The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.Collection: Wisdom
The dog is often quick to resent a kick, be it from man or beast, but I have never known him to show anger at the door that slammed to and hit him. Probably, if the door held him by his tail or his limb, it would quickly receive the imprint of his teeth.Collection: Anger
Leap, and the net will appear.Collection: Motivational
I have discovered the secret of happiness - it is work, either with the hands or the head. The moment I have something to do, the draughts are open and my chimney draws, and I am happy.Collection: Happiness
For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice - no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.Collection: Patience
If you think you can do it, you can.Collection: Motivational
A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did.Collection: Motivational
If I were to name the three 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.Collection: Nature
The secret of happiness is something to do.Collection: Happiness
To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.Collection: Morning
He who marvels at the beauty of the world in summer will find equal cause for wonder and admiration in winter.Collection: Beauty
Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all - that has been my religion.Collection: Religion
Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Nature
The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.Collection: Wisdom
I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.Collection: Nature
A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.Collection: Failure
How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.Collection: Nature
Without the name, any flower is still more or less a stranger to you. The name betrays its family, its relationship to other flowers, and gives the mind something tangible to grasp. It is very difficult for persons who have had no special training to learn the names of the flowers from the botany.Collection: Relationship
Fear, love, and hunger were the agents that developed the wits of the lower animals, as they were, of course, the prime factors in developing the intelligence of man.Collection: Intelligence
The type of mind of Whitman's, which seldom or never emerges as a mere mentality, an independent thinking and knowing faculty, but always as a personality, always as a complete human entity, never can expound itself, because its operations are synthetic and not analytic; its mainspring is love and not mere knowledge.Collection: Knowledge
The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.Collection: Religion
The spirit of man can endure only so much and when it is broken only a miracle can mend it.Collection: Strength
A man can get discouraged many times but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying.Collection: Failure
We talk of communing with Nature, but 'tis with ourselves we commune... Nature furnishes the conditions - the solitude - and the soul furnishes the entertainment.Collection: Nature
In October, a maple tree before your window lights up your room like a great lamp. Even on cloudy days, its presence helps to dispel the gloom.Collection: Great
A sap run is the sweet goodbye of winter. It is the fruit of the equal marriage of the sun and frost.Collection: Marriage
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.Collection: Communication
I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.Collection: Life
To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.Collection: Imagination
Women are about the best lovers of nature, after all; at least of nature in her milder and more familiar forms. The feminine character, the feminine perceptions, intuitions, delicacy, sympathy, quickness, are more responsive to natural forms and influences than is the masculine mind.Collection: Sympathy
Wisdom cannot come by railroad or automobile or aeroplane, or be hurried up by telegraph or telephone.Collection: Wisdom
All sounds are sharper in winter; the air transmits better.
A plump, well-fed stream is as satisfying to behold as a well-fed animal or a thrifty tree. One source of charm in the English landscape is the full, placid stream the season through; no desiccated watercourses will you see there, nor any feeble, decrepit brooks, hardly able to get over the ground.
Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.
Like tens of thousands of others, I have been a spectator of, rather than a participator in, the activities - political, commercial, sociological, scientific - of the times in which I have lived.
My books are, in a way, a record of my life - that part of it that came to flower and fruit in my mind.
My life has been a fortunate one; I was born under a lucky star. It seems as if both wind and tide had favoured me. I have suffered no great losses, or defeats, or illness, or accidents, and have undergone no great struggles or privations; I have had no grouch. I have not wanted the earth.
England is like the margin of a spring-run: near its source, always green, always cool, always moist, comparatively free from frost in winter and from drought in summer.
Even in rugged Scotland, nature is scarcely wilder than a mountain sheep, certainly a good way short of the ferity of the moose and caribou.
England is not a country of granite and marble, but of chalk, marl, and clay.
The country is more of a wilderness, more of a wild solitude, in the winter than in the summer. The wild comes out. The urban, the cultivated, is hidden or negatived.
We love the sight of the brown and ruddy earth; it is the color of life, while a snow-covered plain is the face of death. Yet snow is but the mask of the life-giving rain; it, too, is the friend of man, the tender, sculpturesque, immaculate, warming, fertilizing snow.
There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain that it is positively bad.
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
Some men are like nails, very easily drawn; others however are more like rivets never drawn at all.
One may summon his philosophy when they are beaten in battle, not till then.
The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds - how many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday-lives, and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!
How many thorns of human nature are bristling conceits, buds of promise grown sharp for want of congenial climate.
I have discovered the secret of happiness. It is work.