John Burroughs Quotes

What are men to rocks and mountains?

All the lessons are in nature. You look at the way rocks are formed - the wind and the water hitting them, shaping them, making them what they are. Things take time, you know?

At the same time, there's something magnificent about volcanoes; they created the atmosphere that we need for breathing.

We cannot take one step in geology without drawing upon the fathomless stores of by-gone time.

Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time.

As with other phases of nature, I have probably loved the rocks more than I have studied them.

Sand is overrated. It's just tiny little rocks.

I saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that has then been polished, like a geode. Interest in the land and concern about how we are polluting the air and water of the planet are what make me want to travel back in geologic time-to witness the shaping of the earth before man.

Geology differs as widely from cosmogony, as speculations concerning the creation of man differ from history.

Geology gives us a key to the patience of God.

The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock - cliffs of rock; plateaus of rock; terraces of rock; crags of rock - ten thousand strangely carved forms.

We discover a new world every time we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow.

What wonders lie in every mountain day!

I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest. I lie and relie on the earth.

In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.

I'm really into rocks. I have a really serious rock collection. Rocks and feathers and shells and strange found things in nature. I have a lot of those kinds of collections.

I myself am quite absorbed by the delicate yellow, delicate soft green, delicate violet of a ploughed and weeded piece of soil.

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, and dwell upon it.

How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through the fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas.

When mountains and waters are painted, blue, green, and red paints are used, strange rocks and wondrous stones are used, the four jewels and the seven treasures are used. Rice-cakes are painted in the same manner. When a person is painted, the four great elements and five skandhas are used.

The earth is, like our own skin, fated to carry the scars of ancient wounds.

The successive series of stratified formations are piled on one another, almost like courses of masonry.

Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?

O maternal earth which rocks the fallen leaf to sleep!