The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that we often overlook the value of current opportunities while chasing distant dreams that may be misleading.
John Burroughs conveys the idea that many people are drawn to the allure of distant goals or challenges, believing they offer greater rewards. However, he warns that such pursuits can be deceiving, and that true opportunities often lie in our immediate surroundings. Embracing and recognizing the potential in the present can lead to more meaningful achievements.
In practice
During a motivational speech about career development, one might reference this quote to encourage focusing on local opportunities.
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.
You cannot, in human experience, rush into the light. You have to go through the twilight into the broadening day before the noon comes and the full sun is upon the landscape.
Without the freedom to criticize, there is no true praise.
Your fellow man is your mirror. If your own face is clean, the image you perceive will also be flawless. But should you look upon your fellow man and see a blemish, it is your own imperfection that you are encountering - you are being shown what it is that you must correct within yourself.
In the first place, youβre way off when you start railing at things and people instead of at yourself.
All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.
If you believe that feeling bad will change a past event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
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