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Other authors named John:
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Author's popularity: 3
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If you like or dislike this author in general or one or more of their quotes in particular, please give us your feedback by clicking on the icon to vote for, or the icon to vote against them.
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Popularity: -1
Vote: | A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | A man can get discouraged many times but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Blessed is the man who has some congenial work, some occupation in which he can put his heart, and which affords a complete outlet to all the forces there are in him. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice - no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | If you think you can do it, you can. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all - that has been my religion. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Leap, and the net will appear. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Life is a struggle, but not a warfare. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | One may summon his philosophy when they are beaten in battle, not till then. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Some men are like nails, very easily drawn; others however are more like rivets never drawn at all. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Some scenes you juggle two balls, some scenes you juggle three balls, some scenes you can juggle five balls. The key is always to speak in your own voice. Speak the truth. That's Acting 101. Then you start putting layers on top of that. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The secret of happiness is something to do. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain that it is positively bad. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | To me - old age is always ten years older than I am. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, but to imagine your facts is another. |
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Biography
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John Burroughs (April 3, 1837-March 29, 1921) was an American naturalist and writer.
Biography
Burroughs was born on his family's farm in the Catskill Mountains, near Roxbury, New York, the seventh of ten children to Chauncy and Amy Kelly Burroughs. As a child he would spend many hours on the slopes of Old Clump Mountain, looking off to the east and the higher peaks of the Catskills, especially Slide Mountain, which he would later write about. His classmates at a local school included Jay Gould.
He left school at the age of 17 to become a teacher himself, while he continued his studies at a number of institutions including Cooperstown Seminary, where he first read the works of William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson, both of whom would become lifelong influences through their focus on nature and its effect on the spirit.
Three years later he married Ursula North, while continuing his teaching career with an eye toward becoming a published author, which along with her more prudish attitude to sexuality strained his relations with her. The couple struggled financially and were not able to set up their own household until 1859.
The next year he finally broke through as a writer, when the Atlantic Monthly, then a fairly new publication, accepted his essay "Expression" (Editor James Russell Lowell found it so similar to Emerson's work that he initially thought Burroughs had plagiarized his longtime acquaintance). A short poem, "Waiting", also attracted some attention.
With the onset of the Civil War, and his growing ability to live off his writing, he began to spend more time away from his home in upstate New York and in the literary scenes of New York and later Washington. In 1864, he accepted a position as a clerk at the Treasury, where he would eventually become a bank examiner.
He continued to publish, and grew interested in the poetry of Walt Whitman, whom he frequently defended in literary arguments and later met during a period when Burroughs and his wife were separated. He would become a life-long friend of the Burroughses, and vainly attempted to reconcile the two.
Whitman encouraged Burroughs to develop his nature writing, and Burroughs' work in turn improved Whitman's own perceptions of nature.
In 1867, Burroughs published Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person, the first biography and critical work on the poet, extensively revised and edited by Whitman himself.
Four years later, Wake-Robin was published and became a huge bestseller. As industrialism was solidifying its grasp, readers wanted to be reminded that some of the nature they had never sufficiently appreciated was still around. Burroughs had found his niche, and created the nature essay.
In 1874, he bought a small farm in Esopus, New York, and devoted himself completely to his writing.
Later, he bought some land nearby and in the fall of 1894, began work with his son on an Adirondack-style cabin that would be called "Slabsides".
Burroughs also renovated an old farmhouse near his birthplace and called it "Woodchuck Lodge." This became his summer residence until his death.
He continued to write books of nature essays, some published in periodicals of the time as well, and sell well.
Some of the best came out of trips back to his native Catskills. "The Southern Catskills" (sometimes "The Heart of the Southern Catskills") was the first recorded ascent, in the late 1880s, of Slide Mountain, only recently established as the highest in the region. He had tried to summit the mountain on several previous occasions; when he at last did so he wrote of the view:
Some of these words are on a plaque commemorating Burroughs at the mountain's summit, on a rock outcrop later named Burroughs Ledge. Slide and neighboring Cornell and Wittenberg mountains, which he also climbed on that outing, have been collectively named the Burroughs Range, as has the hiking trail built over it.
Other Catskill essays told, with as much wry humor as awestruck reverence, of fly fishing for trout, of hikes over Peekamoose Mountain and Mill Brook Ridge, of rafting down the East Branch of the Delaware River. It is for these that he is still celebrated in the region today, and chiefly known, although he traveled extensively and wrote about many other regions and countries, as well as commenting on natural-science controversies of the day such as the relatively new theory of natural selection. He also entertained philosophical and literary questions as well, and wrote another book about Whitman in 1896, five years after the poet's death. Ultimately his writing helped persuade the literary establishment of Whitman's virtues.
Burroughs accompanied many personalities of the time in his later years, including Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Henry Ford (who gave him a car, one of the first in the Hudson Valley), Harvey Firestone, and Thomas Edison.
In 1901, Burroughs met Clara Barrus, nearly half his age, the love of his life and ultimately his literary executrix. She moved into his house after Ursula died in 1917.
He died on a train returning from California. He was buried on what was to be his 84th birthday, in Roxbury, at the foot of the rock he had played on as a child.
Burroughs was a popular and highly regarded author in his day. An award for nature writing has been named for him, along with 11 U.S. schools, including a public middle school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a public high school in Burbank, California, and a private secondary school in St. Louis, Missouri.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "John Burroughs".
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