One goes to Nature only for hints and half-truths. Her facts are crude until you have absorbed them or translated them ... It is not so much what we see as what the thing seen suggests.
Interpretation
The essence of nature is revealed not just through direct observation, but through interpretation and deeper understanding.
In this quote, John Burroughs suggests that while nature presents us with a variety of raw facts, these facts require personal reflection and interpretation to uncover their true meaning. He emphasizes that our perception is shaped by what we perceive and the suggestions that arise from our observations, highlighting the importance of a thoughtful engagement with the natural world.
In practice
In a speech about environmental conservation, one could use this quote to emphasize the need for deeper engagement with nature.
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 has given us two ears but only one mouth.
What do we plant when we plant a tree? _x000D_ A thousand things that we daily see, _x000D_ We plant the spire that out-towers the crag, _x000D_ We plant the staff for our country's flag; _x000D_ We plant the shade from the hot sun free, _x000D_ We plant all these when we plant the tree.
The stones were sharp, The wind came at my back; Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.
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.
Beetles and butterflies are sometimes restricted to small areas. Each mountain in a range, and even the different zones of a mountain, may have its own peculiar species. But the house-fly seems to be everywhere. I wonder if any island in mid-ocean is flyless.
For this lovely bowl let us arrange these flowers since there is no rice.
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