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.
To be unforgiving is like to drink poison and wait for someone else to die!! Rev. TD Jakes (have I said how much I love ya!)
...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.
We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every ten minutes.
Be generous in prosperity and thankful in adversity, Be fair in thy judgment, and guarded in thy speech. Be a lamp unto those who walk in darkness, and a home to the stranger. Be eyes to the blind, and a guiding light unto the feet of the erring. Be a breath of life to the body of humankind, a dew to the soil of the human heart, and a fruit upon the tree of humility.
They say that instead of cursing the darkness, one should light a candle. Nothing is mentioned, though, about cursing a lack of candles.
The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
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