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.
Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run.
Nature yields her most profound secrets to the person who is determined to uncover them.
I have thought that wild flowers might be the alphabet of angels, β whereby they write on hills and fields mysterious truths, which it is not given our fallen nature to understand.
The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.
Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant's hood of heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing underneath could make me catch my breath.
I wrote 'Big Yellow Taxi' on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart this blight on paradise. That's when I sat down and wrote the song.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.