John Burroughs
Every day is a Sabbath to me. All pure water is holy water, and this earth is a celestial abode.Collection: Water
You cannot cause disproportionate damage to the environment; you cannot harm neutral states. The court said that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is generally contrary to the international law of armed conflict.Collection: Law
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.Collection: Life
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense his life. . . . The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds - how many human aspirations are realised in their free, holiday-lives - and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!Collection: Beautiful
Unfortunately, nuclear weapons have become identified with state power.Collection: Nuclear
The rocks have a history; gray and weatherworn, they are veterans of many battles; they have most of them marched in the ranks of vast stone brigades during the ice age; they have been torn from the hills, recruited from the mountaintops, and marshaled on the plains and in the valleys; and now the elemental war is over, there they lie waging a gentle but incessant warfare with time and slowly, oh, so slowly, yielding to its attacks!Collection: War
[Invading Iraq] is not the best way to make a safer world in which the United States would be a responsible partner, but it also goes against the role of law in the United States.Collection: Law
Science is a capital or fund perpetually reinvested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward by every new man. Every man of science has all the science before him to go upon, to set himself up in business with. What an enormous sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested! Not so in literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a fund to be reinvested as it is a crop to be ever new-grown.Collection: Art
One summer day, while I was walking along the country road on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down. Amid the general stillness and immobility about me the effect was quite startling. ... It was the sudden summing up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the material of the wall. A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest.Collection: Summer
The art of nature is all in the direction of concealment.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Moving
That which distinguishes this day from all others is that then both orators and artillerymen shoot blank cartridges.Collection: 4th Of July
Now is the time of the illuminated woods ... when every leaf glows like a tiny lamp.Collection: Spring
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.Collection: Thinking
I was born with a chronic anxiety about the weather.Collection: 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.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: 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.Collection: Heart
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
Nature comes home to one most when one is at home. The stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also.Collection: Home
One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are the weeds.Collection: Weed
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.Collection: Country
The gift of perfume to a flower is a special grace like genius or like beauty, and never becomes common or cheap.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Sweet
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.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Country
Certainly in the United States, you have a constituency in the form of the weapons laboratories, and you also have the branches of the armed services that are involved with nuclear weapons deployment, especially the naval submarine operations and also the air force's land-based ICBM operations. So they have a big lobby in Washington.Collection: Air
Culture means the perfect and equal development of man on all sides.Collection: Mean
There are nine countries in the world that have nuclear weapons. There are about 27,000 nuclear weapons total on the planet. The countries that have nuclear weapons deploy them ready for use and have doctrines saying that they would use them in certain circumstances.Collection: Country
When I look up into the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is I really see there, I am constrained to say, ´there is no god´.Collection: Night
The most precious things of life are near at hand, without money and without price. Each of you has the whole wealth of the universe at your very door. All that I ever had, and still have, may be yours by stretching forth your hand and taking it.Collection: Doors
Nature will not be conquered, but gives herself freely to her true lover - to him who revels with her, bathes in her seas, sails her rivers, camps in her woods, and with no mercenary ends, accepts all.Collection: Nature
To see Earth fully we already need to love itCollection: Needs
I am in love with this world. It has been my home. It has been my point of outlook into the universe. I have never bruised myself against it nor tried to use it ignobly.Collection: Home
The fuel in the earth will be exhausted in a thousand or more years, and its mineral wealth, but man will find substitutes for these in the winds, the waves, the sun's heat, and so forth.Collection: Men
The bluebird enjoys the preeminence of being the first bit of color that cheers our northern landscape. The other birds that arrive about the same time--the sparrow, the robin, the phoebe-bird--are clad in neutral tints, gray, brown, or russet; but the bluebird brings one of the primary hues and the divinest of them all.Collection: Cheer
Communing with God is communing with our own hearts, our own best selves, not with something foreign and accidental. Saints and devotees have gone into the wilderness to find God; of course they took God with them, and the silence and detachment enabled them to hear the still, small voice of their own souls, as one hears the ticking of his own watch in the stillness of the night.Collection: Heart
Serene, I fold my hands and wait, Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea; I rave no more 'gainst time or fate, For lo! my own shall come to me.Collection: Time
The God of the Puritans...was a monster too horrible to contemplate.Collection: God
To the scientist Nature is a storehouse of facts, laws, processes; to the artist she is a storehouse of pictures; to the poet she is a storehouse of images, fancies, a source of inspiration; to the moralist she is a storehouse of precepts and parables; to all she may be a source of knowledge and joy.Collection: Nature
When nature made the blue-bird she wished to propitiate both the sky and the earth, so she gave him the color of the one on his back and the hue of the other on his breast.Collection: Blue
I still find each day too short.Collection: Thinking Of You
[Theodore Roosevelt] was a naturalist on the broadest grounds, uniting much technical knowledge with knowledge of the daily lives and habits of all forms of wild life. He probably knew tenfold more natural history than all the presidents who had preceded him, and, I think one is safe in saying, more human history also.Collection: Knowledge
The Universe is a pretty big place... And the one thing I know about nature is it hates to waste anything. So I guess I'd say if it is just us, an awful lot of space is going to waste. The earth is not alone, it is not like a single apple on a tree; there are many apples on the tree, and there are many trees in the orchard.Collection: Hate
The fisherman has a harmless, preoccupied look; he is a kind of vagrant, that nothing fears. He blends himself with the trees and the shadows. All his approaches are gentle and indirect. He times himself to the meandering, soliloquizing stream; he addresses himself to it as a lover to his mistress; he woos it and stays with it till he knows its hidden secrets. Where it deepens his purpose deepens; where it is shallow he is indifferent. He knows how to interpret its every glance and dimple; its beauty haunts him for days.Collection: Sea
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.Collection: Flower
The life of nature we must meet halfway; it is shy, withdrawn, and blends itself with a vast neutral background. We must be initiated; it is an order the secrets of which are well guarded.Collection: Nature
The only countries that are outside of [ Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty] are Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea withdrew in the last few years.Collection: Country