Tree Quotes - Page 25

• Industriousness and conscientiousness are often at odds, because industriousness wants to pick the still sour fruit from the tree,while conscientiousness lets it hang there too long, until it falls and bruises.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Fall, Odds, Long

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• Lightning will wreck its displeasures not only upon pillars, trees, and sheep, but upon altars and temples, and let the sacrilegious go free.

  Seneca the Younger

  Sheep, Lightning, Wrecks

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• Generally speaking, the political news, whether domestic or foreign, might be written today for the next ten years with sufficientaccuracy. Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and I might attend.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Country, Years, Rivers

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.532, Simon and Schuster

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• There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Cutting, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “The Maine Woods: The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Volume III (of 20)”, p.71, Trajectory Inc

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• It is the same among the men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? In persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Reality, Men, Landscape

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.45, Courier Corporation

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• Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men, and institutions, rootedlike oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres; but any particle may suddenly become the centre of the movement, and compel the system to gyrate round it, as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato, or Paul, does forever.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Strong, Plato, Lying

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.161, Graphic Arts Books

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• It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Wise, Night, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1571, Delphi Classics

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• Pride juggles with her toppling towers, They strike the sun and cease, But the firm feet of humility They grip the ground like trees.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Humility, Pride, Feet

  Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “The Ballad Of The White Horse”

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• If trees can create art, if they can encircle the globe seven times in one year, if prisoners can grow plants and raise frogs, then perhaps there are other static entities that we hold inside ourselves, like grief, like addictions, like racism, that can also change.

  Nalini Nadkarni

  Art, Grief, Years

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• In felling a tree we should cut into the trunk of it to the very heart, and then leave it standing so that the sap may drain out drop by drop throughout the whole of it... Then and not till then, the tree being drained dry and the sap no longer dripping, let it be felled and it will be in the highest state of usefulness.

  Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

  Heart, Cutting, Sap

  "De architectura (Ten Books on Architecture)". Book by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (Book II, Chapter IX, Section 3), circa 15 BC.

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• The leaves of these [larch] trees are like those of the pine; timber from them comes in long lengths, is as easily wrought in joiner's work as is the clearwood of fir, and contains a liquid resin, of the color of Attic honey, which is good for consumptives.

  Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

  Color, Long, Honey

  "De architectura". Book by Vitruvius. Book II, Chapter IX, Section 17,

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• The spring is here, young and beautiful as ever, and absolutely shocking in its display of reckless maternity; but the Judas treewill bloom for you on the Bosphorus if you get there in time. No one ever loved the dog-wood and Judas tree as I have done, and it is my one crown of life to be sure that I am going to take them with me to heaven to enjoy real happiness with the Virgin and them.

  Henry Adams

  Beautiful, Dog, Spring

  Henry Adams, Worthington Chauncey Ford (1969). “1892-1918”

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• Trees which grow in places facing the course of the sun are not of porous fiber but are solid, being drained by the dryness... The trees in sunny neighborhoods, therefore, being solidified by the compact texture of their fiber, and not being porous from moisture, are very useful, so far as durability goes, when they are hewn into timber. The lowland firs, being conveyed from sunny places, are better than those highland firs, which are brought here from shady places.

  Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

  Moisture, Texture, Fiber

  "De architectura (Ten Books on Architecture)". Book by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (Book II, Chapter X "Highland and Lowland Fir", Section 1), circa 15 BC.

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• George Foreman can knock down
  an oak tree
  ... but oak trees don't move.

  Angelo Dundee

  Moving, Oak Tree, Oaks

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• One must have a mind of winter
  To regard the frost and the boughs
  Of the pine-trees crusted with snow

  Wallace Stevens

  Winter, Snow, Mind

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.89, Vintage

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• The longer it possesseth a man the more he will delight in it, and the older he groweth the more he shall be subject to it; for it dulleth the spirits, and destroyeth the body as ivy doth the old tree, or as the worm that engendereth in the kernal of the nut.

  Walter Raleigh

  Men, Nuts, Ivy

  Sir Walter Raleigh (1829). “The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh, Kt: Miscellaneous works”, p.568

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• When the savages of Louisiana wish to have fruit, they cut the tree at the bottom and gather the fruit. That is exactly a despotic government.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Cutting, Government, Wish

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• It is noticeable how intuitively in age we go back with strange fondness to all that is fresh in the earliest dawn of youth. If we never cared for little children before, we delight to see them roll in the grass over which we hobble on crutches. The grandsire turns wearily from his middle-aged, careworn son, to listen with infant laugh to the prattle of an infant grandchild. It is the old who plant young trees; it is the old who are most saddened by the autumn; and feel most delight in the returning spring.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Children, Spring, Autumn

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• Genius in the poet, like the nomad of Arabia, ever a wanderer, still ever makes a home where the well or the palm-tree invites it to pitch the tent. Perpetually passing out of himself and his own positive circumstantial condition of being into other hearts and into other conditions, the poet obtains his knowledge of human life by transporting his own life into the lives of others.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Heart, Home, Genius

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• Along a stream that raced and ran
  Through tangled trees and over stones,
  That long had heard the pipes o' Pan
  And shared the joys that nature owns,
  I met a fellow fisherman,
  Who greeted me in cheerful tones.
  . . . .
  Foes think the bad in him they've guessed
  And prate about the wrong they scan;
  Friends that have seen him at his best
  Believe they know his every plan;
  I know him better than the rest,
  I know him as a fisherman.

  Edgar Guest

  Believe, Thinking, Fishing

  Edgar Albert Guest, “The Fisherman”

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• There's nothing that builds up a toil-weary soul
  Like a day on a stream,
  Back on the banks of the old fishing hole
  Where a fellow can dream.
  There's nothing so good for a man as to flee
  From the city and lie
  Full length in the shade of a whispering tree
  And gaze at the sky.
  . . . .
  It is good for the world that men hunger to go
  To the banks of a stream,
  And weary of sham and of pomp and of show
  They have somewhere to dream.
  For this life would be dreary and sordid and base
  Did they not now and then
  Seek refreshment and calm in God's wide, open space
  And come back to be men.

  Edgar Guest

  Dream, Lying, Men

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• [Man's] life consists in a relation with all things: stone, earth, trees, flowers, water, insects, fishes, birds, creatures, sun,rainbow, children, women, other men. But his greatest and final relation is with the sun.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Children, Flower, Men

  D. H. Lawrence, Michael Herbert (1988). “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays”, p.374, Cambridge University Press

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• Why, why are people all balls of bitter dust? Because they won't fall off the tree when they're ripe. They hang on to their old positions when the position is overpast, till they become infested with little worms and dry-rot.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Change, Fall, Dust

  D. H. Lawrence (2016). “Women in Love”, p.122, Xist Publishing

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• We humans think we are smart, but an orchid, for example, knows how to produce noble, symmetrical flowers, and a snail knows how to make a beautiful, well-proportioned shell. Compared with their knowledge, ours is not worth much at all. We should bow deeply before the orchid and the snail and join our palms reverently before the monarch butterfly and the magnolia tree. The feeling of respect for all species will help us recognize the noblest nature in ourselves.

  Nhat Hanh

  Beautiful, Respect, Nature

  Thich Nhat Hanh “Thich Nhat Hanh: Essential Writings”, Orbis Books

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• Morality is the fruit of religion: to desire the former without the latter is to desire an orange without an orange-tree.

  Philibert Joseph Roux

  Orange Trees, Desire, Fruit

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