John Burroughs Quotes

Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future.

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

Destroying is a necessary function in life. Everything has its season, and all things eventually lose their effectiveness and die.

Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only.

When one's dead, one's dead... This squirrel will become earth all in his time. And still later on, there'll grow new trees from him, with new squirrels skipping about in them. Do you think that's so very sad?

Nature creates while destroying, and doesn't care whether it creates or destroys as long as life isn't extinguished, as long as death doesn't lose its rights.

Everything that gets born dies.

I think that, when you die, you go back to where you came from before you were born. So I don't think death is a bad thing.

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

The two most mysterious things in our lives are birth and death. They are both miraculous events; one brings shiny, brand new life into the world, and the other snuffs it out like that. That person isn't there anymore.

You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born.

Generations of men are like the leaves. In winter, winds blow them down to earth, but then, when spring season comes again, the budding wood grows more. And so with men: one generation grows, another dies away.

I am part of the cycle, rebirth death, rebirth death, rebirth death.

All death in nature is birth, and at the moment of death appears visibly the rising of life. There is no dying principle in nature, for nature throughout is unmixed life, which, concealed behind the old, begins again and develops itself. Death as well as birth is simply in itself, in order to present itself ever more brightly and more like to itself.

Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.

What if it is for life's sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable. We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever, growth would be stifled, and youth would find no room on earth. Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous. In the midst of death life renews itself immortally.

Is life a pregnancy? That would make death a birth.

Learn from nature. Stuff lives and stuff dies all the time, you know. Animals and birds and flowers. Trees come and go, and we come and go. That's it. So we should all seize life and make the most of what we have while we can.

Time takes all and gives all.

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?

I wouldn't mind at all coming back to earth after my death.

Everything that rises sets, and everything that grows, grows old.

I think at the prospect of bringing children into the world, your mortality comes very much to the forefront, absolutely.

I think death is just a transition to another state of consciousness.