I go to books and to nature as a bee goes to the flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of seeking knowledge and inspiration from books and nature to create something unique.
In this quote, John Burroughs likens his pursuit of knowledge and inspiration to a bee collecting nectar from flowers. Just as a bee transforms nectar into honey, he transforms the ideas and beauty he finds in books and nature into his own creative essence. This highlights the interconnectedness of nature, literature, and creativity, suggesting that genuine inspiration can nourish personal growth and artistic expression.
In practice
Using this quote during a book club meeting to emphasize the importance of literature.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.
Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.
Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
All these other creatures have an equal right to exist here. We have no prior rights to the Earth than anybody else, and if they're here, let's give them a chance to survive.
The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
If we could begin to look at water pollution as a human rights violation, and we could begin to look at criminal aspects of this, I think that could be a game changer for many companies who want to not be forthwith and think that they can just hold off in a lawsuit for 10 years, and in the meantime, people are still being poisoned.
We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.
With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you're connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live. Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea.
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