John Burroughs Quotations

(from Accepting the Universe, 1920)

The immeasurable, the Infinite, is over us and under us, and our lives are like sparks against the night. But, just as we live in the heavens and do not know it, so we live and move and have our being in the Eternal. It is not afar off; it is here; we are a part of it, and as inseparable from it as from gravity. (p. 222)

. . . in the pursuit of truth, if we are sincere, we do not seek to administer to, or to warm and cheer our human affections. Our seriousness will be measured by the extent to which we put all these things behind us. Heroic self-denial finds a field here as well as in the struggles of life. We do not want to cheer ourselves with illusions, no matter how welcome they are. "All's right with the world." The laws of life and death are as they should be; and if death ends my consciousness, still is death good. I have had life on these terms, and somewhere, somehow, the course of nature is justified. I shall not be imprisoned in that grave where you are to bury my body. I shall be diffused in great Nature, in the soil, in the air, in the sunshine, in the hearts of those who love me, in all the living and flowing currents of the world, though I may never again in my entirety be embodied in a single human being. My elements and my forces go back into the original sources out of which they came, and these sources are perennial in this vast, wonderful, divine cosmos. (pp 251-252)

The word "God" has so long stood for the conception of a being who sits apart from Nature, who shapes and rules it as its maker and governor. It is part of the conception of a dual or plural universe, God and Nature. This offends my sense of the oneness of creation. It seems to me that there is no other adequate solution of the total problem of life and Nature than what is called "pantheism," which identifies mind and matter, finite and Infinite, and sees in all these diverse manifestations one absolute being. As Emerson truly says, pantheism does not belittle God, it magnifies him. God becomes the one and only ultimate fact that fills the universe and from which we can no more be estranged than we can be estranged from gravitation. (pp. 270-271)

In our floods of religious emotion we instinctively look away from the earth. The mystery, the immensity, the purity of the heavens above us make us turn our faces thitherward, and as naturally make us turn downward when we consider the source of evil. The poor old earth which has mothered us and nursed us we treat with scant respect. Our awe and veneration we reserve for the worlds we know not. Our senses sell us out. The mud on our shoes disenchants us. It is only Whitman with his cosmic consciousness that can closely relate the heavens and the earth:

"Underneath the divine soil,

Overhead the sun."

To most of us the morning stars that once sang together are of another stuff. The music of the spheres must be vastly different from the roar and grind of our old rusty and outworn planet. So we turn to the heavens, the abode of purity and light. So do we discount and black-list the earth where we have to pay in struggle and pain the price of our development. Think you we should not have to pay the same price in any other world worth living in? (pp. 294-295)

Our ecclesiastical faith must be housed in churches and kept warm by vestments. The moment we take it out into the open and expose it to unroofed and unwarmed universal nature, it is bound to suffer from the cosmic chill. For my part, I do not have to take my faith in out of the wet and the cold. It is an open-air faith, an all-the-year-round faith; neither killing frosts nor killing heats disturb it; not tornadoes nor earthquakes nor wars nor pestilence nor famine make me doubt for one moment that the universe is sound and good. The forces which brought us here and provided so lavishly for our sustenance and enjoyment; that gave us our bodies and our minds; that endowed us with such powers; that surrounded us with such beauty and sublimity; that brought us safely through the long and hazardous journey of evolution; that gave us the summer sun, the midnight skies, and the revolving seasons; that gave human love and fellowship and cooperation, childhood, motherhood, and fatherhood, and the sense of justice and mercy, are beneficent and permanent forces. They are directed to me personally because they are directed to all that live; they are the cause of the living, the essence and sum of all life of the globe. I do not mind if you call them terrestrial forces; the terrestrial and the celestial are one. I do not mind if you call them material forces; the material and the spiritual are inseparable. I do not mind if you call this view the infidelity (or atheism) of science; science, too is divine; all knowledge is knowledge of God. (pp. 312-313)