American - Author | April 3, 1837 - March 29, 1921
When Darwin published his conclusion that man was descended from an apelike ancestor who was again descended from a still lower type, most people were shocked by the thought; it was intensely repugnant to their feelings.
John Burroughs
ManPeopleThoughtFeelingsAgain
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.
NatureWomenCharacterBestMind
Father knew me not. All my aspirations in life were a sealed book to him, as much as his peculiar religious experiences were to me.
LifeFatherMeBookHimPeculiar
Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.
VisionWritingFishTidePlacesUp
Living in the city is a discordant thing, an unnatural thing. The city, a place to which one goes to do business, is a place where men overreach each other in the fight for money. But it is not a place in which one can live.
LiveBusinessMoneyMenFightCity
Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
BornObservationYearsOnlyMade
If America wishes to preserve her native birds, we must help supply what civilization has taken from them. The building of cities and towns, the cutting down of forests, and the draining of pools and swamps have deprived American birds of their original homes and food supply.
FoodBirdsBuildingAmericanHelp
The naturist must see all things in the light of his experiences in this world.
LightWorldSeeExperiencesThings
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.
LoveFearIntelligenceManAnimals
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
ManRealityInterestingRealTraits
As life nears its end with me, I find myself meditating more and more upon the mystery of its nature and origin, yet without the least hope that I can find out the ways of the Eternal in this or in any other world.
LifeNatureHopeMyselfMeWorld
To me, nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which it grows and lives: the fine, hair-like rootlets at the bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at the top.
TreeMeNothingTopBottomCells
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