John Burroughs Quotes

I find it a lot healthier for me to be someplace where I can go outside in my bare feet.

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least - and it is commonly more than that - sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.

I love the feeling of the fresh air on my face and the wind blowing through my hair.

I like to fish. Fishing is always a way of relaxing.

I go five steps in the garden, and I immediately lose track of time... it is a kind of joy in being alive in being in the world. I always found that in the garden. That is what it means to me.

I've often said there's nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse.

My favorite place to read is next to the pond in my backyard.

The best version of surfing is not competing, I think. It's just... it's perfect. You're perfectly present. You're perfectly in the moment. You're perfectly not thinking about anything else in the world. You're just surfing. You're surfing away with your friends or your family, and that's it. You're just there.

I love to fish. I love the peacefulness of being around the water.

When you look at a tree and perceive its stillness, you become still yourself. You connect with it at a very deep level. You feel a oneness with whatever you perceive in and through stillness.

I think it is the best of humanity that goes out to walk. In happy hours, I think all affairs may be wisely postponed for walking.

Go to the meadows, go to the garden, go to the woods. Open your eyes!

Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season.

I go fishing not to find myself but to lose myself.

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

If I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of head or hands. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

For every runner who tours the world running marathons, there are thousands who run to hear leaves and listen to rain and look to the day when it all is suddenly as easy as a bird in flight.

Next to prayer, Fishing is the most personal relationship of man.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?

Your car, comfort though it be, this little den and dining room on wheels, is a prison that deadens your senses, and to feel wholly alive you must go for a walk.

... Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, 'so far from everything?' When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.

Someone was sitting in front of a sunflower, watching the sunflower, a cup of sun, and so I tried it too. It was wonderful; I felt the whole universe in the sunflower. That was my experience. Sunflower meditation. A wonderful confidence appeared. You can see the whole universe in a flower.

Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.