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John Burroughs
(3 Apr 1837 - 29 Mar 1921)
American naturalist and author whose many writings and books, by celebrating nature in highly readable essays, significantly nurtured the conservation movement in the United States.
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Science Quotes by John Burroughs (9 quotes)
In the printed page the only real things are the paper and the ink; the white spaces play the same part in aiding the eye to take in the meaning of the print as do the black letters.
— John Burroughs
From Under the Apple-Trees (1916), 302.
Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all—that has been my religion.
— John Burroughs
The Heart of Burroughs's Journals (1928), 257.
Natural history is a matter of observation; it is a harvest which you gather when and where you find it growing. Birds and squirrels and flowers are not always in season, but philosophy we have always with us. It is a crop which we can grow and reap at all times and in all places and it has its own value and brings its own satisfaction.
— John Burroughs
From Under the Apple-Trees (1916), Preface.
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.
— John Burroughs
Under the Apple-Trees (1916), 105.
Science sees the process of evolution from the outside, as one might a train of cars going by, and resolves it into the physical and mechanical elements, without getting any nearer the reason of its going by, or the point of its departure or destination.
— John Burroughs
From Under the Apple-Trees (1916), 212.
The floating vapour is just as true an illustration of the law of gravity as the falling avalanche.
— John Burroughs
The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, May 1883 to October 1883 (1883), 26, 539.
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. (1916)
— John Burroughs
From Under the Apple-Trees (1916), 308.
The rocks are not so close akin to us as the soil; they are one more remove from us; but they lie back of all, and are the final source of all. ... Time, geologic time, looks out at us from the rocks as from no other objects in the landscape.
— John Burroughs
From Under the Apple-Trees (1916), Chap. 2, 'The Friendly Rocks', 40.
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!
— John Burroughs
Under the Apple-Trees (1916), 42.
See also:
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3 Apr - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Burroughs's birth. -
John Burroughs - The Friendly Rocks - an excerpt from Under the Apple-Trees (1916), giving a naturalist's view of rocks: “The rocks are not so close akin to us as the soil ... [but they] are the final source of all.”
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John Burroughs - an excerpt from Under the Apple-Trees (1916) - Great Questions In Little: Astronomic Grandeur - reflections on the Universe, the Why and How of science, the Limitations of Science, the Beginnings of Life, and Evolution.
At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. -- Carl Sagan
