“Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaf and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin’ in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin’ in the poplar trees.”
"Strange Fruit" (1939). Though Holiday's renditions made this anti-lynching song famous, it was written by Abel Meeropol (using his pseudonym "Lewis Allen").
Misattributed
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Billie Holiday26
American jazz singer and songwriter 1915–1959Related quotes
Abbas Kiarostami (1940–2016) Iranian film director, screenwriter, photographer and film producer
http://nofilmschool.com/2016/07/abbas-kiarostami-death-cinema-lessons
Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation
Source: The Freedom of a Christian (1520), pp. 74-75
Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher
56 Phocion
Apophthegms of Kings and Great Commanders
“Learn to eat of the tree of Knowledge, and of the tree of Life enjoy the fruit.”
Theodor Reuss (1855–1923) German singer
IV. Defense and Support : Building blocks for the O.T.O. Temple
Parsifal and the Secret of the Graal Unveiled (1914)
Context: Closing Word
Learn to eat of the tree of Knowledge, and of the tree of Life enjoy the fruit. Seek both within yourself, and so you recognize them and know their place, you are come to the highest rung of the 12 step ladder.
Through this will the Divine-Love be awoken that does not have a place in the twisted minds of men, but dwells in his heart, from which the salvational current will be born which gives us the vision of the eternal light and annihilates all falsity.
"The eternal-feminine draws us up?!"
William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist
Letter to William Hayley (1803-10-07)
1810s
Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer
Section 6 : Higher Life
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)
Context: Man is like a tree, with the mighty trunk of intellect, the spreading branches of imagination, and the roots of the lower instincts that bind him to the earth. The moral life, however, is the fruit he bears; in it his true nature is revealed.
It is the prerogative of man that he need not blindly follow the law of his natural being, but is himself the author of a higher moral law, and creates it even in acting it out.
Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661) Scottish Reformed theologian
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 10.