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.
Healing means accepting all parts of ourselves, not just the parts we like, but all of us.
Go beyond everything. Don't collect anything. _x000D_ A king does not need to go shopping in his own _x000D_ kingdom. Nor does he beg. _x000D_ Remember, you are the inner reality-pure awareness only. _x000D_ All that arises are appearances in consciousness. _x000D_ Don't bother with all that. Rest only as the awareness. _x000D_ This is the secret.
It is much better to tempt fortune where it can favor you than to see your certain ruin by not tempting it.
Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.
The gift of learning to meditate is the greatest gift you can give yourself in this life. For it is only through meditation that you can undertake the journey to discover your true nature, and so find the stability and confidence you will need to live, and die, well; Meditation is the road to enlightenment.
The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul
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