Tree Quotes - Page 22

• To the birds and trees he talks:
  Caesar of his leafy Rome,
  There the poet is at home.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Nature, Home, Rome

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Emerson: Poems”, p.197, Everyman's Library

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• Autumn is the American season. In Europe the leaves turn yellow or brown, and fall. Here they take fire on the trees and hang there flaming. We think this frost-fire is a portent somehow: a promise that the continent has given us. Life, too, we think, is capable of taking fire in this country; of creating beauty never seen.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Country, Fall, Autumn

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• The Bishop has a skin, God knows,
  Wrinkled like the foot of a goose,
  (All find safety in the tomb.)
  Nor can he hide in holy black
  The heron's hunch upon his back,
  But a birch-tree stood my Jack.

  William Butler Yeats

  Feet, Hypocrisy, Safety

  William Butler Yeats (1997). “The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition”, p.260, Simon and Schuster

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• Old age is
  a flight of small
  cheeping birds
  skimming
  bare trees
  above a snow glaze.

  William Carlos Williams

  Snow, Bird, Age

  William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.152, New Directions Publishing

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• I see for Nature no defeat
  In one tree's overthrow
  Or for myself in my retreat
  For yet another blow.

  Robert Frost

  Nature, Blow, Retreat

  David A. Sohn, Richard Tyre, Robert Frost (1969). “Frost: The Poet and His Poetry”

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• Now close the windows and hush all the fields:
  If the trees must, let them silently toss.

  Robert Frost

  Silence, Toss, Fields

  Robert Frost (2012). “A Boy's Will and North of Boston”, p.22, Courier Corporation

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• Our age is bent on trying to make the barren tree of skepticism fruitful by tying the fruits of truth on its branches.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Age, Trying, Branches

  Albert Schweitzer (1953). “Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography: Postscript 1932-1949 by Everett Skillings”

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• God took pattern after a pine tree and built you noble.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Beauty, Noble, Patterns

  Zora Neale Hurston, Chic Street Man, George C. Wolfe (2000). “Spunk: Three Tales”, p.37, Dramatists Play Service Inc

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• Books, gentlemen, are a species of men, and introduced to them you circulate in the "very best society" that this world can furnish, without the intolerable infliction of "dressing" to go into it. In your shabbiest coat and cosiest slippers you may socially chat even with the fastidious Earl of Chesterfield, and lounging under a tree enjoy the divinest intimacy with my late lord of Verulam.

  Herman Melville

  Reading, Book, Men

  Herman Melville (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)”, p.4516, Delphi Classics

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• A gentleman of Typee can bring up a numerous family of children and give them all a highly respectable cannibal education, with infinitely less toil and anxiety than he expends in the simple process of striking a light; whilst a poor European artisan, who through the instrumentality of a lucifer performs the same operation in one second, is put to his wits' end to provide for his starving offspring that food which the children of a Polynesian father, without troubling their parent, pluck from the branches of every tree around them.

  Herman Melville

  Children, Father, Simple

  Herman Melville (2012). “Typee: A Romance of the South Seas (Illustrated & Annotated Edition)”, p.129, Jazzybee Verlag

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• The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha,
  It held the shivering, the shaken limbs,
  Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.

  Wallace Stevens

  Lakes, Wind, Body

  Wallace Stevens (1954). “Collected poems”

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• The heavy trees,
  The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust,
  The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines
  Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.

  Wallace Stevens

  Blue, Feelings, Depth

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.191, Vintage

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• Man’s usurpation over nature is an egotism that will destroy human as well as whale kingdoms. … Academies should return to wisdom study in tree groves rather than robot study in plastic cells

  Allen Ginsberg

  Men, Cells, Whales

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• Someone is dead.
  Even the trees know it,
  those poor old dancers who come on lewdly,
  all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.

  Anne Sexton

  Dancer, Green, Poor

  Anne Sexton, Diane Wood Middlebrook, Diana Hume George (2000). “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton”, p.47, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature, such as it is, weak or strong, and the thing which pleases us. Whatever is formed according to this standard pleases us, be it house, song, discourse, verse, prose, woman, birds, rivers, trees, room, dress, and so on. Whatever is not made according to this standard displeases those who have good taste.

  Blaise Pascal

  Beauty, Song, Strong

  Blaise Pascal (2010). “Thoughts, Letters & Minor Works”, p.16, Cosimo, Inc.

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• On the tree, Future, we build our nest; and in our solitude eagles shall bring us nourishment in their beaks!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Eagles, Solitude, Nests

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1977). “The Portable Nietzsche”, p.133, Penguin

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• I was thinking, I could turn him into a fly and drop him into a spider's web and watch him tangled and helpless and struggling, shut into the body of a dying buzzing fly; I could wish him dead until he died.I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth. if he was under the ground I could walk over him stamping my feet.

  Shirley Jackson

  Struggle, Thinking, Feet

  Shirley Jackson (2010). “Novels and Stories: The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Other Stories and Sketches”

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• The forest of Compiegne. Look at it. Like a kind grandmother dozing in her rocking chair. Old trees practicing curtsies in the wind because they still think Louis XIV is king.

  Billy Wilder

  Kings, Grandmother, Thinking

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• Children, behold the Chimpanzee:
  He sits on the ancestral tree
  From which we sprang in ages gone.

  Oliver Herford

  Children, Age, Gone

  Oliver Herford (2017). “This Giddy Globe”, p.65, Litres

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• When I behold the heavens as in their prime,
  And then the earth (though old) still clad in green,
  The stones and trees, insensible of time,
  Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen

  Anne Bradstreet

  Beauty, Wrinkles, Heaven

  Anne Bradstreet, Jeannine Hensley (1967). “The Works of Anne Bradstreet”, p.209, Harvard University Press

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• Out of the woods my Master came,
  Content with death and shame.
  When Death and Shame would woo Him last,
  From under the trees they drew Him last:
  'Twas on a tree they slew Him--last
  When out of the woods He came.

  Sidney Lanier

  Woods, Lasts, Violence

  Sidney Lanier (1999). “Poems of Sidney Lanier”, p.141, University of Georgia Press

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• When we suddenly awake to the realization that there is no barrier, and never has been, one realizes that one is all things mountains, rivers, grasses, trees, sun, moon, stars, universe are all oneself. There is no longer a division or barrier between myself and others, no longer any feeling of alienation or fear there is nothing apart from oneself and therefore nothing to fear. Realizing this results in true compassion. Other people and things are not seen as apart from oneself but, on the contrary, as one's own body.

  Bruce Lee

  Stars, Moon, Compassion

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• What is last year's snow to me,
  Last year's anything? The tree
  Budding yearly must forget
  How its past arose or set

  Countee Cullen

  Past, Years, Snow

  Countee Cullen (2013). “Countee Cullen: Collected Poems: (American Poets Project #32)”, p.64, Library of America

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• A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in the race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle.

  Kate Millett

  Change, Real, Circles

  Kate Millett (2000). “Flying”, p.360, University of Illinois Press

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• O happy, golden age!
  Not for that rivers ran
  With streams of milk, and honey dropped from trees

  Torquato Tasso

  Milk And Honey, Rivers, Age

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