Quotes about trees
page 14

“These are just the rules and regulations
Of the birds, and the bees
The earth, and the trees,
Not to mention the gods, not to mention the gods.”

Rufus Wainwright (1973) American-Canadian singer-songwriter and composer

Rules and Regulations
Song lyrics, Release the Stars (2007)

God, Bird, Bee

“Then cricket sing thy song, or answer mine
Thine whispers blame, but mine has naught but praises
It matters not. — Behold the autumn goes,
The Shadow grows,
The moments take hold of eternity;
Even while we stop to wrangle or repine
Our lives are gone
Like thinnest mist,
Like yon escaping colour in the tree: —
Rejoice! rejoice! whilst yet the hours exist
Rejoice or mourn, and let the world swing on
Unmoved by Cricket-song of thee or me.”

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821–1873) American poet

"The Cricket" lines 120–131

World, Autumn, Singing

“I met a girl who works at the Double Tree front desk, she gave me her phone number. It's zero. I tried to call her from here and some other woman answered. I said "You sound older!"”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

Mitch All Together (2003)

Girl

“We are the Cheras, one of the four erstwhile royal families of South India and have a long and dynastic family tree. By 1750 Travancore had become rich and big. So my ancestor, the then king, made a unique spiritual and historical contribution. He decided to surrender all his riches to the temple - Padmanabhaswamy is also our family deity. He said our family would look after that wealth, the temple and the kingdom forever. But he did want the ego that comes with possessing it. He was influenced by Emperor Ashoka's catharsis in the killing fields of Kalinga. So he declared our family to be Padmanabha's 'dasas', devotees. A servant can resign his job, but a dasa can do so only when he dies.”

Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma (1922–2013) Maharaja of Travancore

On his family links with the Padmanabhaswamy temple in
The riches belong to nobody, certainly not to our family, 2009

Family, Wealth

“Under the lime tree
On the heather,
Where we had shared a place of rest,
Still you may find there,
Lovely together,
Flowers crushed and grass down-pressed.”

Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet

Under der linden an der heide, dâ unser zweier bette was, dâ mugt ir vinden schône beide gebrochen bluomen unde gras. "Under der linden", line 1; translation by Raymond Oliver. http://colecizj.easyvserver.com/pgvogund.htm

Love, Flowers, Grass

“Q: I have read that you also, at least sometimes, had a chain around your neck, and you were tied to a tree?
A: M-hm. Most of the time, I would say.
Q: Were you tortured?
A: There are things that I don't want to talk about.
Q: Were there any other women among the hostages?
A: There were more women among the hostages, but the last four years of my captivity I was the only woman on the camp, so it was very difficult.”

Íngrid Betancourt (1961) Colombian-French politician

Reference http://svtplay.se/v/1416302/rakt_pa_med_kg_bergstrom/1_av_10?cb,a1364145,1,f,103521/pb,a1364142,1,f,103521/pl,v,,1430389/sb,p103521,1,f,-1 Interview with KG Bergström for Sveriges Television

Women, Time, Reading

“We and the trees and the way
Back from the fields of play
Lasted as long as we could
No more walks in the wood”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

Extract-last verse from 'An Old Fashioned Song' in 'Tesserae and other poems' (1993)
Poetry Quotes

Way

“A healthy forest, untouched by forestry technology, is made up of a strange mixture of vegetation. Alongside well-defined areas of noble trees, conditions of apparent chaos can be found, which can best be described as irregular confusion. People who are not aware of the importance of the balance in Nature, of which the forest is a part, want to clear areas of everything they do not consider to be useful. A great deal of sensitive concern and observation is necessary to begin to understand why Nature depends on an apparently chaotic disorder.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Viktor Schauberger wrote in 1930
Living Water

People, Understanding, Nature, Parting

“They will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree!”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

"John Brown's Body" http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/scsmhtml/scsmhome.html (1861)

“The young tree of resistance in Palestine is blooming and blooms of faith and desire for freedom are flowering.
The Zionist regime is a decaying and crumbling tree that will fall with a storm. Today even the inhabitants of the occupied Palestine, especially the African and Asian settlers are living in [p]ain, poverty and discontent.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

2006, 2006 International Qods Conference address

Faith, Flowers, Freedom

“For experience teacheth me that straight trees have crooked roots.”

John Lyly book Euphues

P. 311 http://books.google.com/books?id=3xRbAAAAMAAJ&q=&quot;for+experience+teacheth+me+that+straight+trees+have+crooked+roots&quot;&pg=PA311#v=onepage Euphues and his England

“When we all got back to camp, our General communicated by heliograph through a distant mountain top with Sir valley and lay it waste with fire and sword in vengeance. This accordingly we did, but with great precautions. We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation. So long as the villages were in the plain, this was quite easy. The tribesmen sat on the mountains and sullen watched the destruction of their homes and means of livelihood. When however we had to attack the villas on the sides of the mountains they resisted fiercely, and we lost for every village two or three British officers and fifteen or twenty native soldiers. Whether it was worth it, I cannot tell. At any rate, at the end of a fortnight the valley was a desert, and honour was satisfied.”

Winston S. Churchill book My Early Life

My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930)
Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=ooFGl74WbXsC&pg=PT149

Home, Mountain, Communication, Distant

“With a tongue like a razor he will kiss
the mother, the child,
and we three will color the stars black
in memory of his mother
who kept him chained to the food tree
or turned him on and off like a water faucet
and made women through all these hazy years
the enemy with a heart of lies.”

Anne Sexton book The Book of Folly

"The Wifebeater"
The Book of Folly (1972)

Women, Food, Color, Star

“After falling for a very long time, as I surmise after the fact (I was falling so fast that I must have lost track), all I can remember is that I found myself under a tree. I was entangled in three or four rather large branches I had broken in my fall. An apple had squashed against my face and made it all wet with its juice.
Fortunately, as you will soon learn, this place was the Garden of Eden, and the tree I had fallen into was none other than the Tree of Life. You would be quite right to think I would have been killed a thousand times over but for this miraculous good fortune.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)

Life, Thinking, Learning, Time

“To few Freemasons of the present day, except to those who have made Freemasonry a subject of especial study, is the name of Desaguliers very familiar. But it is well that they should know that to him, perhaps, more than to any other man, are we indebted for the present existence of Freemasonry as a living Institution, for it was his learning and social position that gave a standing to the Institution, which brought to its support noblemen and men of influence so that the insignificant assemblage of four London Lodges at the Apple-Tree Tavern has expanded into an association which now shelters the entire civilized world. And the moving spirit of all this was John Theophilus Desaguliers.”

Albert Mackey (1807–1881) U.S. writer on freemasonry

(1924), p. 208.
An encyclopedia of freemasonry and its kindred sciences, (1912)

Men, World, Support, Study

“It is remarkable that India became a democracy in modern times, because the long-lasting Hindu civilisation at first sight was innately hostile to the ideas that all adults should have an equal vote, irrespective of their caste, and that all adults should be able to share in the social mobility which was part of the democratic spirit. But to graft exotic new trees onto old, when there seemed little hope of success, and to watch them grow vigorously, is not a rare experience in human institutions.”

Geoffrey Blainey book A Short History of the World

A Short History of the World (2000)

Hostility, Hope, Democracy, Idea

“As the shell, the pith and the kernel of the fruit are all produced form one parent seed of the tree, so from the one Lord is produced the whole of creation, animate and inanimate, spiritual and material.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 867

Parent, Animals

“Why do we complain about the Fall? It is not on its account that we were expelled from Paradise, but on account of the Tree of Life, lest we might eat of it.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

82, a slight variant of this was later published in Parables and Paradoxes (1946):
Why do we lament over the fall of man? We were not driven out of Paradise because of it, but because of the Tree of Life, that we might not eat of it.
"Paradise"
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)

Life

“I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. Only we can know that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree..”

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) Italian painter

Source: 1945 - 1964, Interview, 1960, p. 107

World, Understanding

“A man is the resultant and exponent of all the forces that have been brought to bear upon him, whether before his birth or afterwards. His action at any moment depends solely upon his constitution, and on the intensity and direction of the various agencies to which he is, and has been, subjected. Some of these will counteract each other; but as he is by nature, and as he has been acted on, and is now acted on from without, so will he do, as certainly and regularly as though he were a machine.
We do not generally admit this, because we do not know the whole nature of any one, nor the whole of the forces that act upon him. We see but a part, and being thus unable to generalise human conduct, except very roughly, we deny that it is subject to any fixed laws at all, and ascribe much both of a man’s character and actions to chance, or luck, or fortune; but these are only words whereby we escape the admission of our own ignorance; and a little reflection will teach us that the most daring flight of the imagination or the most subtle exercise of the reason is as much the thing that must arise, and the only thing that can by any possibility arise, at the moment of its arising, as the falling of a dead leaf when the wind shakes it from the tree.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 25

Law, Exercises, Imagination, Birth

“The power which causes the several portions of the plant to help each other, we call life. Much more is this so in an animal. We may take away the branch of a tree without much harm to it; but not the animal's limb. Thus, intensity of life is also intensity of helpfulness — completeness of depending of each part on all the rest. The ceasing of this help is what we call corruption; and in proportion to the perfectness of the help, is the dreadfulness of the loss. The more intense the life has been, the more terrible is its corruption.”

John Ruskin book Modern Painters

Volume V, part VIII, chapter 1, section 4 (1860).
Modern Painters (1843-1860)

Life, Loss, Help, Animals

“Long before… our techniques of today, men could conceive and build structures adapted to the requirements of resistance… because he had observed… the branches of a tree bending under the weight of fruits and the tensioned cords of strings in which children have rocked from time immemorial…”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

p, 125
Philosophy of Structures (1958)

Men, Children, Time

“The axe is laid to the root of the tree. … I will hew it down. And as I live, I will plague your Honor, Pomp, Greatness, Superfluity, and confound it into parity, equality, community.”

Abiezer Coppe (1619–1672) English writer

A Fiery Flying Roll (1650)

Communication

“In the mountains a night of rain,
And above the trees a hundred springs.”

Wang Wei (699–759) a Tang dynasty Chinese poet, musician, painter, and statesman

As quoted in Lin Yutang's My Country and My People (1936), p. 247

Mountain, Spring, Night

“Outside in the garden, the greenhouse collapses. Masonry crashes from the roof and splashes into the moat. The grave-marker for the pig Hortense moves up out of the ground. The Maillol statue stands firm as the shrubs around it quiver. A water-main bursts in the yard sending a shower into the air. Trees fall as though whipped down to the ground. The water on the lake shimmers and ripples like a film run backwards.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Penultimate paragraph of the published script.
8 1/2 Women

Water

“As a boy I was very solitary but blissfully happy. We lived on the edge of town in Wexford and I wandered the fields with my dog, declaiming Keats to the trees.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

Dogs, Boy, Happiness

“There are three Empires. First there is the Empire which was founded on the tree of knowledge. Then there is the Empire founded on the tree of the Cross. The third is still a secret Empire which will be founded on the tree of knowledge and the tree of the Cross — brought together.”

Henrik Ibsen Emperor and Galilean

Emperor and Galilean (1873), as quoted by Lester B. Pearson in his address on accepting the Nobel Peace Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway (10 December 1957) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1957/pearson-acceptance.html

Secret, Knowledge

“No thoughtful persons could stand beneath one of these immense trees, gaze up into its canopy, and help but think that here is a remarkable organism—so much more than all the board-feet of lumber that men might cleave from it.”

Reed Noss (1952)

2000)[More than big trees, The redwood forest: History, ecology, and conservation of the coast redwoods, 1–6, https://books.google.com/books?id=6T3PeH_EbbYC&pg=PA1] (quote from p. 1

Men, Thinking, Help, Personality

“We have been friends together
In sunshine and in shade.
Since first beneath the chestnut-tree
In fancy we played
But coldness dwells within thine heart
A cloud is on thy brow.
We have been friends together,—
Shall a light word part us now?”

Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton (1808–1877) English feminist, social reformer, and author

We have been Friends.

Light, Heart, Parting

“For me Ruisdael is the true man of poetry, the real poet. There is a world of sad, serious and beautiful thoughts in his paintings. They possess a soul and a voice that sounds deep, sad and dignified. They tell melancholic stories, speak of gloomy things and are witnesses of a sad spirit. I see him wander, turned in on himself, his heart opened to the beauties of nature, in accordance with his mood, on the banks of that dark gray stream that rustles and splashes along the reeds. And those skies!... In the skies one is completely free, untied, all of himself.... what a genius he is! He is my ideal and almost something perfect. When it storms and rains, and heavy, black clouds fly back and forth, the trees whiz and now and then a strange light breaks through the air, and falls down here and there on the landscape, and there is a heavy voice, a grand mood in nature; that is what he paints; that is what he [Ruysdael] is imaging.”

Gerard Bilders (1838–1865) painter from the Netherlands

(version in original Dutch / citaat van Bilders' brief, in het Nederlands:) Ruisdael is voor mij de ware man der poezië, de echte dichter. Daar is een wereld van droevige, ernstige schone gedachten in zijn schilderijen. Ze hebben een ziel en een stem, die diep, treurig, deftig klinkt. Zij doen weemoedige verhalen, spreken van sombere dingen, getuigen van een treurige geest. Ik zie hem dwalen, in zichzelf gekeerd, het hart geopend voor de schoonheden der natuur, in overeenstemming met zijn gemoed, aan de oevers van die donkere grauwe stroom die ritselt en plast langs het riet. En die luchten!.. .In de luchten is men geheel vrij, ongebonden, geheel zichzelf.. ..welke een genie is hij [Ruisdael]! Hij is mijn ideaal en bijna iets volmaakts.Als het stormt en regent, en zware, zwarte wolken heen en weer vliegen, de bomen suizen en nu en dan een wonderlijk licht door de lucht breekt en hier en daar op het landschap neervalt, en er een zware stem, een grootse stemming in de natuur is, dat schildert hij, dat geeft hij weer.
Source: 1860's, Vrolijk Versterven' (from Bilders' diary & letters), pp. 51+52, - quote from Bilders' diary, 24 March 1860, written in Amsterdam

World, Sadness, Beauty, Soul

“The deepest, most disgusting shame ever perpetrated by a people in history, the Germans have done onto themselves. Egged on and misled by the tribe of Juda whom they hated, who were guests among them! That was their thanks! Let no German ever forget this, nor rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated from German soil! This poisonous mushroom on the German oak-tree!”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Letter to General August von Mackensen (2 December 1919), quoted in John C. G. Röhl, The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 210
1910s

Hate, People, History, Forgetting

“So the stimulus didn't just waste your money; it planted the seeds from which the poisonous tree of death panels will grow.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

Death, Money

“Satan be praised! Glory to you on High
where once you reigned in Heaven, and in the
Pit where now you dream in taciturn defeat!
Grant that my soul, one day, beneath the Tree
of Knowledge, meet you when above your brow
its branches, like a second Temple, spread!”

Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal

Gloire et louange à toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs
Du Ciel, où tu régnas, et dans les profondeurs
de l’Enfer, où, vaincu, tu rêves en silence!
Fais que mon âme un jour, sous l’Arbre de Science,
Près de toi se repose, à l’heure où sur ton front
Comme un Temple nouveau ses rameaux s’épandront!
"Les Litanies de Satan" [Litanies of Satan]
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

Dreams, Soul, Knowledge

“Thomas Jefferson said, "The tree of liberty must be fertilized from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Yeah, and I heard that and thought, "I'm out!"”

Christopher Titus (1964) actor, writer, podcaster

Neverlution (2011)

Time

“A fool puts her hand into a hollow tree without finding out what’s inside first.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Lini
(15 October 1993)

Fools

“Why are those buildings swaying like trees? ~ Hotel Womb”

Steve Kilbey (1954) British artist

Lyrics

“In the United Kingdom, for example, the sheer overwhelming dominance of London makes it extremely for provincial cities to develop more than a very restricted financial function. London, in that sense, is akin to the notorious upas tree, a fabulous Javanese tree so poisonous that it destroys all life for many miles around itself.”

Peter Dicken (1938) British geographer

Source: Global Shift (2003) (Fourth Edition), Chapter 13, The Financial Services Industries, p. 467

Life, Sense

“Decision tree - The most picturesque of all the allegedly scientific aids to making decisions. The analyst charts all the possible outcomes of different options, and charts all the latters' outcomes, too. This produces a series of stems and branches (hence the tree). Each of the chains of events is given a probability and a monetary value.”

Robert Heller (1932–2012) British magician

Source: The Pocket Manager, (1987), p. 73

Decision

“Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

1853
Notebooks, The American Notebooks (1835 - 1853)

Love, Life

“Nature has a million answers. Even as I observe tree trunks, roots, branches, idling in some corner, to be burnt down as wood, it affords an excellent laboratory to the mind. It is exciting, sensuous and intoxicating. If one submits oneself to the form and the raw energy of the tree even when it can no longer bear fruit and leaves, one can see great poetry and lyricism in its intertwining branches and roots. The functional sculptures and paintings are a result of this experiment. The process takes over thereafter, but it is just an ode to nature's beauty.”

Manav Gupta (1967) Indian artist

As quoted in "Indian Design and Interiors" IDI Magazine (October 2006)
2000s

Beauty, Nature, Painting

“Just as a tree cut down, that fell
To north, or southward, there it lies:
So man departs to heaven or hell,
Fix'd in the state wherein he dies.”

Isaac Watts (1674–1748) English hymnwriter, theologian and logician

Song 10: "Solemn Thoughts of God and Death".
1710s, Divine Songs Attempted in the Easy Language of Children (1715)

Hell

“I am like a tree,
From my top boughs I can see
The footprints that led up to me.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"Here"
Tares (1961)

“somewhere within sight
of the tree of poetry
that is eternity wearing
the green leaves of time.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"Prayer"
Later Poems (1983)

Time

“I think we need some new Christmas carols with a more modern approach. Of course, I wouldn’t abandon the religious theme completely. How about “Holy Christ, the Christmas Tree’s on Fire”? Or ”Jesus, Can You Believe It’s Christmas Again?” This ought to get the ball rolling; I’m hoping you people will take it from here.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Source: Books, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (2004)

People, Hope, Thinking, Christmas

“Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.”

Alexander Pope Moral Essays

Epistle I, To Lord Cobham (1734), line 150
Moral Essays (1731–1735)

“I finished my first woodcut in Dresden in 1905 after the Xylographic art, cutting out of the hard boxwood the clean sketches with the slate pencil. Then followed the rounded iron, to arrive at the woodcut more freely through the simply ripped out sketch on the log (alder, lime tree, poplar), which would be utilized from here on out. Then finally came a short cobbler knife, and without a pré-sketch, the hand cuts freely into the wood a woodcut, just like it would work on paper with the pen.”

Erich Heckel (1883–1970) German artist

Heckel later summarized in this way his woodcut developments, mainly developed during his years in Die Brücke Source: Brücke' Zeichnungen, Aquarelle, Druckgraphik, Magdalena M. Moeller; Verlag Gerd Hatje, Stuttgart 1992, p. 21; as quoted by Louise Albiez https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272168564Claire (incl. translation), Brücke und Berlin: 100 Jahre Expressionismus; submitted to the Division of Humanities New College of Florida, Sarasota, Florida, May, 2013 p.12

Art

“The devil came to Eve in Genesis chapter three, ‘The serpent said unto the woman, ‘Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” First sentence out of the devil's mouth was a question to make Eve doubt God's word. He always does that by the way. He’s always going to make you try to doubt God's word. The second thing he said to the woman was, ‘Ye shall not surely die:’ Now he’s calling God a liar. The third thing he said to the woman was, ‘Hey, if you eat off that tree, ye shall be as gods.’ And right there is where the whole idea of Evolution got started. It didn’t start with Charley Darwin. It started with Satan in the Garden of Eden. He wants you to think you can become like gods. Yes boys and girls, we are evolving. We started off like an amoeba and we’re getting bigger and better and stronger and smarter and in some day we’re going to sail around the universe and discover new life forms like Star Trek.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Age of the Earth

Life, God, Way, Girl

“The story of the Baudelaires does not take place in a fictional land where lollipops grow on trees and singing mice do all of the chores. The story of the Baudelaires takes place in a very real world, where some people are laughed at just because they have something wrong with them, and where children can find themselves all alone in the world, struggling to understand the sinister mystery that surrounds them….”

Daniel Handler book The Carnivorous Carnival

Lemony Snicket
The Carnivorous Carnival (2002)

Children, People, World, Understanding

“O, how I choke in uttering my disgrace!
Thinking I her embraced whom I did seek,
A mountain hard I found I did embrace.
Overgrown with trees and bushes nothing sleek.
Thus (grappling with a mountain face to face,
Which I stood pressing for her angel's cheek)
I was no man: no but a stupid block
And grew unto a rock another rock.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Stanza 56 (tr. Richard Fanshawe); spoken by Adamastor.
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto V

Stupidity, Angels, Mountain, Thinking

“Here, in the company of the mindless trees, the free-flying birds, the bugs and frogs that passed from stimulus directly to response without the interval of consciousness between, did I hope to lose myself in the living mandala of evolution’s less self-tortured forms.”

Norman Spinrad book The Void Captain's Tale

Source: The Void Captain's Tale (1983), Chapter 10 (pp. 117-118)

Hope, Bird, Flying

“The Lord himself hath led him with his own Almighty hand.
He hath caused him to spring from a trunk without root, and planted him again in a distant and more delightful spot, and caused him to rise up to a considerable tree.
Inspired him with an inclination for science so passionate as to become the most gratifying of all others.
Given him all the means he could either wish for, or enjoy, of attaining the objects he had in view.
Favoured him in such a manner that even the not obtaining of what he wished for, ultimately turned out to his great advantage.
Caused him to be received into favour by the "Mœcenates Scientiarum"; by the greatest men in the kingdom; and by the Royal Family.
Given him an advantageous and honourable post, the very one that, above all others in the world, he had wished for.
Given him the wife for whom he most wished, and who managed his household affairs whilst he was engaged in laborious studies.
Given him children who have turned out good and virtuous.
Given him a son for his successor in office.
Given him the largest collection of plants that ever existed in the world, and his greatest delight.
Given him lands and other property, so that though there has been nothing superfluous, nothing has he wanted.
Honoured him with the titles of Archiater, Knight, Nobleman, and with Distinction in the learned world.
Protected him from fire.
Preserved his life above 60 years.
Permitted him to visit his secret council-chambers.
Permitted him to see more of the creation than any mortal before him. Given him greater knowledge of natural history than any one had hitherto acquired.
The Lord hath been with him whithersoever he hath walked, and hath cut off all his enemies from before him, and hath made him a name, like the name of the great men that are in the earth. 1 Chron. xvn. 8.”

Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist

As quoted in The Annual Review and History of Literature http://books.google.com.mx/books?id=hx0ZAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=es#v=onepage&q=%22The%20Lord%20himself%20hath%20led%20him%20with%20his%20own%20Almighty%20hand%22&f=false (1806), by Arthur Aikin, T. N. Longman and O. Rees, p. 472. Also found in Life of Linnaeus https://archive.org/stream/lifeoflinnaeus00brigiala#page/176/mode/2up/search/endeavoured (1858), by J. Van Voorst & Cecilia Lucy Brightwell, London. pp. 176-177. Linnaeus Diary

Life, Men, Children, Secret

“The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

1872(?), page 92
John of the Mountains, 1938

Love, Soul, Mountain, Flowers

“Calico Pie,
The little Birds fly
Down to the calico tree,
Their wings were blue,
And they sang "Tilly-loo!"
Till away they flew,—
And they never came back to me!”

Edward Lear (1812–1888) British artist, illustrator, author and poet

Calico Pie http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ns/calico.html, st. 1 (1871).

Bird, Flying

“I received a draft of a beautiful Tree penciled on a large sheet of white paper bearing ripe fruit I saw it plainly it looked very singular and curious to me. I have since learned that this tree grows in the Spirit Land. Afterwards the spirit showed me plainly the branches, leaves, and fruit presented or drawn upon paper. The leaves were checked or (unreadable) and the same color you see here. I entreated Mother Ann to tell me the name of this tree which she did Oct 1st 4th hour PM by moving the hand of a medium to write twice over Your Tree is the Tree of Life.”

Hannah Cohoon (1781–1864) American artist

Hand printed below Hannah Cohoon's painting of "The Tree of Life" dated July 3, 1854

Life, Beauty, Color, Learning

“So we had about 80 or 90 Germans there disarmed, and had another line of Germans to go through to get out. So I called for my men, and one of them answered from behind a big oak tree, and the others were on my right in the brush.
So I said, "Let's get these Germans out of here."
One of my men said, "it is impossible."”

Alvin C. York (1887–1964) United States Army Medal of Honor recipient

So I said, "No; let's get them out."
Account of 8 October 1918.
Diary of Alvin York

Men

“Once there was a tree, and she loved a little boy.”

Shel Silverstein (1930–1999) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

The Giving Tree http://classics.tumblr.com/post/100196656

Love, Boy

“In shapeless clumps the ferns are brown and dead
Among the fir-trees dusk is swiftly born:
The maples will be desolate by morn
The last word of the summer has been said”

Francis Joseph Sherman (1871–1926) Canadian writer

"October" (sonnet) http://www.sonnets.org/shermanf.htm

Summer, Dead

“With each tentative tiptoe and stumble, I had to inwardly assure myself that I was a good comedian and that my life was not pointless. “I am addicted to comfort,” I thought as I tumbled into the wood chips. I have become divorced from nature; I don’t know what the names of the trees and birds are. I don’t know what berries to eat or which stars will guide me home. I don’t know how to sleep outside in a wood or skin a rabbit. We have become like living cutlets, sanitized into cellular ineptitude. They say that supermarkets have three days’ worth of food. That if there was a power cut, in three days the food would spoil. That if cash machines stopped working, if cars couldn’t be filled with fuel, if homes were denied warmth, within three days we’d be roaming the streets like pampered savages, like urban zebras with nowhere to graze. The comfort has become a prison; we’ve allowed them to turn us into waddling pipkins. What is civilization but dependency? Now, I’m not suggesting we need to become supermen; that solution has been averred before and did not end well. Prisoners of comfort, we dread the Apocalypse. What will we do without our pre-packed meals and cozy jails and soporific glowing screens rocking us comatose? The Apocalypse may not arrive in a bright white instant; it may creep into the present like a fog. All about us we may see the shipwrecked harbingers foraging in the midsts of our excess. What have we become that we can tolerate adjacent destitution? That we can amble by ragged despair at every corner? We have allowed them to sever us from God, and until we take our brothers by the hand we will find no peace.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Life, God, Peace, Food

“.. I let myself go.. [in Kandinsky's Murnau-period when he was painting in open air; c. 1908 – 1914] I thought little of the houses and trees, but applied colour stripes and spots to the canvas with the knife and made them sing out as strongly as I could. Within me sounded the memory of early evening in Moscow, before my eyes was the strong, colour-saturated scale of the Munich light and atmosphere, which thundered deeply in the shadows.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

'..stripes and spots with the knife', as he learned then also Gabriele Münter - they frequently painted together in open air
Source: 1916 -1920, Autobiography', 1918, p. 31

Light, Strong, Memory, Singing

“Any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. the grass, the soil — everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble.”

Tim O'Brien book The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried (1990), How to Tell a True War Story

Life, Death, Pleasure, Truth

“No monument should stand over my grave, only an apple-tree, in memory of the three apples; the two of Eve and Paris, which made hell out of earth, and that of I. Newton, which elevated the earth again into the circle of heavenly bodies.”

Farkas Bolyai (1775–1856) Hungarian mathematician

As quoted by Florian Cajori, A History of Mathematics (1893) p. 303, citing Franz Schmidt, "Aus dem Leben zweier ungarischer Mathematiker Johann und Wolfgang Bolyai von Bolya," Grunert's Archiv, 48:2, 1868.

Hell, Memory

“When the blessed canopy had been fixed about a mile from the gate of Arangal, the tents around the fort were pitched together so closely that the head of a needle could not go between them' Orders were issued that every man should erect behind his own tent a kathgar, that is wooden defence. The trees were cut with axes and felled, notwithstanding their groans; and the Hindus, who worship trees, could not at that time come to the rescue of their idols, so that every cursed tree which was in that capital of idolatry was cut down to the roots'….
'During the attack, the catapults were busily plied on both sides' 'Praise be to God for his exaltation of the religion of Muhammad. It is not to be doubted that stones are worshipped by Gabrs,74 but as the stones did no service to them, they only bore to heaven the futility of that worship, and at the same time prostrated their devotees upon earth”

Alauddin Khalji (1266–1316) Ruler of the Khalji dynasty

Elliot and Dowson, Vol. III : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 81-83
Quotes from The History of India as told by its own Historians

God, Religion, Time

“God bless all the precious little examples and all their cascading implications; without these gems, these tiny acorns bearing the blueprints of oak trees, essayists would be out of business.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Questioning the Millennium

Questioning the Millennium (second edition, Harmony, 1999), p. 42

God, Business

“I'm thinking that somewhere around the world, I remember after this 9/11 event back home, people didn't feel much like playing, singing, people didn't feel like going out. But then I thought you know, that somewhere in the world, somebody's hiding behind a rock or a tree, or a wall, or something, and somebody else has been shooting at them for quite some time. Somebody's dreaming, somebody's hoping that somewhere, somebody's singing. Somebody's smiling, and laughing, and life is good, and it's fun to be a human being, and it's all right. And I thought man we got to keep that spirit going, you know, and so we got back out on the road. But I think of that every time that we play now. It would be nice to go anywhere in the world to go and do these kind of things and have fun and live right and not be worried about stuff like that. That's my hope, that everywhere in the world that will happen soon.”

Arlo Guthrie (1947) American folk singer

Statements said on "Live in Sydney" before playing "Highway in the Wind"

Life, People, World, Smile

“I will not bring dishonor on my sacred arms nor will I abandon my comrade wherever I shall be stationed. I will defend the rights of gods and men and will not leave my country smaller, when I die, but greater and better, so far as I am able by myself and with the help of all. I will respect the rulers of the time duly and the existing ordinances duly and all others which may be established in the future. And if anyone seeks to destroy the ordinances I will oppose him so far as I am able by myself and with the help of all. I will honor the cults of my fathers. Witnesses to this shall be the gods Agraulus, Hestia, Enyo, Enyalius, Ares, Athena the Warrior, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo, Hegemone, Heracles, and the boundaries of my native land, wheat, barley, vines, olive-trees, fig-trees…”

Lycurgus (-390–-324 BC) Ancient Greek politician and orator

(The oath of the ephebi, [young men] of Athens at the age of eighteen). Speeches, Against Leocrates, 1, 77.

Men, God, Time, Future

“For eighteen years Jesus worked thus as a day labourer. We find him ever afterward identifying himself with the working class. Passages like, "which of you intending to build"; "the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers"; "the burden and heat of the day"; "no man hath hired us"; and the references to the patching of worn garments and hewing down trees for firewood, give evidence of a working-class consciousness.”

Bouck White (1874–1951) American author and novelist

Source: The Call of the Carpenter (1914), pp. 39-40

“I give you joy of having left Winchester. Now you may own how miserable you were there; now it will gradually all come out, your crimes and your miseries — how often you went up by the Mail to London and threw away fifty guineas at a tavern, and how often you were on the point of hanging yourself, restrained only, as some ill-natured aspersion upon poor old Winton has it, by the want of a tree within some miles of the city.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to J. Edward Austen (1816-12-16) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Nature, Joy

“We came down from the trees, up from the grasslands, and into an SUV. We drove. We motored. We headed for that Texas horizon, flat as the flat-line on a heart monitor, straight to the brink of extinction, all the while pumping gas.”

Andrea Lewis (writer) Microsoft employee

"Cryonic Freeze" Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Winter 2013) "Felix, Living History Enactor, Despairs."
2010-

Heart

“The trees that whisper in the evening
Carried away by a moonlight shadow
Sing a song of sorrow and grieving
Carried away by a moonlight shadow
All she saw was a silhouette of a gun
Far away on the other side
He was shot six times by a man on the run
And she couldn't find how to push trough
I stay, I pray, see you in heaven far away
I stay, I pray, see you in heaven one day…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Crises (1983)

Singing, Time

“If this apprehension of the facts be correct, and the documentary evidence would appear to verify it, then certain conclusions are bound to follow. A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if its roots be destroyed. In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man — these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

People, World, Faith, Spring

“Things whispered here, and the trees muttered with the wind and perhaps with other things. Men knew the place was old, old as the world, and they never made peace with it.”

C. J. Cherryh book The Dreamstone

The Dreamstone, Book One : The Gruagach, Ch. 1 : Of Fish and Fire
Arafel's Saga (1983)

Men, World, Peace

“Plowboy: In your opinion, what are mankind's prospects for the near future?
Asimov: To tell the truth, I don't think the odds are very good that we can solve our immediate problems. I think the chances that civilization will survive more than another 30 years—that it will still be flourishing in 2010—are less than 50 percent.
Plowboy: What sort of disaster do you foresee?
Asimov: I imagine that as population continues to increase—and as the available resources decrease—there will be less energy and food, so we'll all enter a stage of scrounging. The average person's only concerns will be where he or she can get the next meal, the next cigarette, the next means of transportation. In such a universal scramble, the Earth will be just plain desolated, because everyone will be striving merely to survive regardless of the cost to the environment. Put it this way: If I have to choose between saving myself and saving a tree, I'm going to choose me.
Terrorism will also become a way of life in a world marked by severe shortages. Finally, some government will be bound to decide that the only way to get what its people need is to destroy another nation and take its goods … by pushing the nuclear button.
And this absolute chaos is going to develop—even if nobody wants nuclear war and even if everybody sincerely wants peace and social justice—if the number of mouths to feed continues to grow. Nothing will be able to stand up against the pressure of the whole of humankind simply trying to stay alive!”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Mother Earth News interview (1980)

Life, War, People, Truth

“Dressing up in costumes, playing silly games
Hiding out in tree-tops shouting out rude names
— whistling tunes we hide in the dunes by the seaside
— whistling tunes we piss on the goons in the jungle.
It’s a knockout.”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

Games Without Frontiers
Song lyrics, Peter Gabriel (III) (1980)

Game

“The island lies like a strange, misshapen dagger in the blue Ionian Sea, midway along the Greek and Albanian coastlines.
In the past, it has fallen into the hands of a dozen different nations, from all of which it has absorbed what it found good and rejected the rest, thus keeping its individuality. Unlike so many parts of Greece, it is green and lush, for when it was part of the Venetian empire they used it as their oil store, planting thousands of olive trees, so that now the bulk of the island is shaded by these carunculated giants with their wigs of silvery-green leaves. Between them run the admonishing fingers of black-green cypress, many planted in groves as dowries. All this creates a mystical landscape, bathed in sharp brittle sunlight, orchestrated by the knife-grinder song of the cicadas, framed in the blue, still sea. Of all the wonderful and fascinating parts of the planet I have been privileged to visit, Corfu is the nearest approach to home for me, since it was here, nurtured in sunlight, that my fascination for the living world around me came to fruition.”

Gerald Durrell (1925–1995) naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter

How to Shoot an Amateur Naturalist (1984)

World, Home, Past, Parting

“Too many for the fruit cut down the tree,
And find their gain in world-wide misery.”

Francesco Dall'Ongaro (1808–1873) Italian poet, playwright and librettist

Troppi taglian la pianta per i frutti,
E traggono lor pro dal mal di tutti.
Stornelli Politici, "Gaetano Semenza", II.
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 428.

World

“As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book IV, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

World, Way, Mountain, Boy

“A cup of wine, under the flowering trees;
I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
For he, with my shadow, will make three men.
The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine;
Listless, my shadow creeps about at my side.
Yet with the moon as friend and the shadow as slave
I must make merry before the Spring is spent.
To the songs I sing the moon flickers her beams;
In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks.
While we were sober, three shared the fun;
Now we are drunk, each goes his way.
May we long share our odd, inanimate feast,
And meet at last on the Cloudy River of the sky.”

Li Bai (701–762) Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty poetry period

"Drinking Alone by Moonlight" (月下獨酌), one of Li Bai's best-known poems, as translated by Arthur Waley in More Translations From the Chinese (1919)
Variant translation:
From a pot of wine among the flowers
I drank alone. There was no one with me—
Till, raising my cup, I asked the bright moon
To bring me my shadow and make us three.
Alas, the moon was unable to drink
And my shadow tagged me vacantly;
But still for a while I had these friends
To cheer me through the end of spring...
I sang. The moon encouraged me.
I danced. My shadow tumbled after.
As long as I knew, we were boon companions.
And then I was drunk, and we lost one another.
...Shall goodwill ever be secure?
I watch the long road of the River of Stars.
"Drinking Alone with the Moon" (trans. Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-hu)

Men, Way, Spring, Flowers

“Man, air, trees, world are laid bare and are one!”

Max Pechstein (1881–1955) German artist

World

“It is better to guide one soul than to possess all that is on earth, for as long as that guided soul is under the shadow of the Tree of Divine Unity, he and the one who hath guided him will both be recipients of God’s tender mercy, whereas possession of earthly things will cease at the time of death. The path to guidance is one of love and compassion, not of force and coercion. This hath been God’s method in the past, and shall continue to be in the future!”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

II, 16
The Persian Bayán

Love, Death, God, Soul

“Here I am quite alone amongst the Oaks and solitudes of Helmingham Park. I have taken quiet possession of the parsonage finding it quite empty. A woman comes up from the farm house (where I eat) and makes the bed; and I am left at liberty to wander were I please during the day. There are abundance of fine trees of all sort; through the place upon the whole affords good objects [rather] than fine scenery, but I can badly judge yet what I may have to shew You. I have made one of two… drawing that may be useful. I shall not come home yet.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from Constable's letter to John Dunthorne on his drawing: 'Helmingham Dell,' 1800, as quoted in Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable (Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1993), p. 391
1800s - 1810s

Home, Solitude, Drawing, Housing

“When April winds
Grew soft, the maple burst into a flush
Of scarlet flowers. The tulip tree, high up,
Opened in airs of June her multitude
Of golden chalices to humming-birds
And silken-wing'd insects of the sky.”

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) American romantic poet and journalist

The Fountain http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16341/16341-h/16341-h.htm#page227, st. 3 (1839)

Flowers, Bird

“Let us not today fling accusation at the murderers. What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.
We should demand his blood not from the Arabs of Gaza but from ourselves.... Let us make our reckoning today. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house.... Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood.”

Moshe Dayan (1915–1981) Israeli military leader and politician

The Iron Wall (1999)

Waiting, Housing

“So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan (1797 or 1798)

“Myriad contradictory worlds,” lectured Professor Jerome Delacato, “forever splitting off from each other like branches on a tree, so that, somewhere out there, I am presently giving a lecture explaining how the many-worlds hypothesis cannot possibly be true.”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 5 (p. 88)

World

“You said in our old ash-tree a bird had built its nest;
Perhaps this very linnet has there its place of rest.
Now who will keep his little ones when night begins to fall?
They have no other shelter, and they will perish all.
There'll be no more sweet singing within that lonely grove;
Now, Henry, free your prisoner, I pray you, for my love.
Our father is a soldier, and in some distant war
He too might be a prisoner in foreign lands afar.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Prisoner
Traits and Trials of Early Life (1836)

Love, War, Bird, Distant

“I had so many other interests at the time: drawing, tinkering, building, inventing, games, sports, climbing trees. It took me through high school, and then college to settle on photography. But a half-century later, I'm still staging my shots.”

Walter Wick (1953) American photographer and creator of children's books

My First Roll Of Film http://www.walterwick.com/blog/2016/3/2/my-first-roll-of-film-1 (March 2, 2016)

School, Game, Sport, Time

“willow of crystal, a poplar of water,
a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
tree that is firmly rooted and that dances,
turning course of a river that goes curving,
advances and retreats, goes roundabout,
arriving forever:
the calm course of a star
or the spring, appearing without urgency,
water behind a stillness of closed eyelids
flowing all night and pouring out prophecies,
a single presence in the procession of waves
wave over wave until all is overlapped,
in a green sovereignty without decline
a bright hallucination of many wings
when they all open at the height of the sky, course of a journey among the densities
of the days of the future and the fateful
brilliance of misery shining like a bird
that petrifies the forest with its singing
and the annunciations of happiness
among the branches which go disappearing,
hours of light even now pecked away by the birds,
omens which even now fly out of my hand, an actual presence like a burst of singing,
like the song of the wind in a burning building,
a long look holding the whole world suspended,
the world with all its seas and all its mountains,
body of light as it is filtered through agate,
the thighs of light, the belly of light, the bays,
the solar rock and the cloud-colored body,
color of day that goes racing and leaping,
the hour glitters and assumes its body,
now the world stands, visible through your body,
and is transparent through your transparency”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Sun Stone (1957)

Fate, World, Color, Mountain

“The blossom is out in full now, it’s plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white. It’s the whitest, frothiest blossomest blossom that ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the now-ness of everything is absolutely wondrous.”

Dennis Potter (1935–1994) English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist

Final television interview with Melvyn Bragg (5 April 1994)

“The wind was a torrent of darkness upon the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight looping the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding —
Riding — riding —
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door.”

Alfred Noyes book The Highwayman

The Highwayman (1907)

Sea

“Tomkinson: What are these?
Mother: Shoe trees, dear…”

Michael Palin (1943) British comedian, actor, writer and television presenter

"Tomkinson's Schooldays"
Ripping Yarns (1976 - 1979)

Shoe

“Tis soothing, oh! most soothing to the heart,
To rove 'mid scenes where once we have been blest!
Each tree, each blossom, has a thrilling charm;
They seem memorials of those happier hours :
The very sigh that tells they are no more,
Is sweet unto the spirit; former days,
And former feelings, rise upon the soul,
Dear as they once have been.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Canto II, XII
The Fate of Adelaide (1821)

Feeling, Soul, Memory, Heart

“Two lovers, here at the corner, by the steeple,
Two lovers blow together like music blowing:
And the crowd dissolves about them like a sea.
Recurring waves of sound break vaguely about them,
They drift from wall to wall, from tree to tree.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Music, Lovers, Sea

“There's alcohol in plant and tree.
It must be Nature's plan
That there should be in fair degree
Some alcohol in Man.”

A. P. Herbert (1890–1971) British politician

Number Nine ([1951] 1952) p. 151.

Alcohol, Nature

“One day, while I was painting a landscape in the neighbourhood of Algiers [March 1881] I saw a man approaching who seemed to be dressed in purple and cloth-of-gold... When the traveler reached me, my illusion vanished; my emir was nothing but a flea-bitten beggar. The sun, the divine sun had enriched him with its light... It's always the same in Algeria. The magic of the sun transmutes the palm-trees into gold, the water seems full of diamonds and men become the Kings from the East.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1880's, Renoir – his life and work, 1975, pp. 156-157 : quote, 1881 on the illusion by sunlight, from Renoir et ses amis, Georges Riviere.

Men, Travel, Light, Water

“Bid me despair, and I'll despair,
Under that cypress tree;
Or bid me die, and I will dare
E'en Death, to die for thee.”

Robert Herrick book Hesperides

" To Anthea, st. 5 http://www.bartleby.com/106/96.html". Hesperides (1648)

Death, Despair

“Painting is the magic art, the fire set alight on the windows of the rich dwelling, as on those of the humble hovel, from the last rays of the setting sun, it is the long mark, the humid mark, the fluent and still mark that the dying wave etches on the hot sand, it is the darting of the immortal lizard on the rock burnt by the midday heat, it is the rainbow of conciliation, on sad May afternoons, after the storm has passed, down there, making a dark backdrop to the almond trees in flower, to the gardens with their washed colours, to the ploughmen's huts, smiling and tranquil, it is the livid cloud chased by the vehement blowing of Aeolus enraged, it is the nebulous disk of the fleeting moon behind the ripped-open funereal curtain of a disturbed sky in the deep of night, it is the blood of the bull stabbed in the arena, of the warrior fallen in the heat of battle, of Adonis' immaculate thigh wounded by the obstinate boar's curved tusk, it is the sail swollen with the winds of distant seas, it is the centuries-old tree browned in the autumn..”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from the first lines in De Cirico's essay 'Painting', 1938; from http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/211_Painting_1938_Metaphysical_Art.pdf 'Painting', 1938 - G. de Chirico, presentation to the catalogue of his solo exhibition Mostra personale del pittore Giorgio de Chirico, Galleria Rotta, Genoa, May 1938], p. 211
1920s and later

Sadness, Smile, Art, Flowers

“Why faintest thou! I wander’d till I died.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.”

Matthew Arnold Thyrsis

St, 24
Thyrsis (1866)

Love, Travel, Light

“A cemetery is an affront to the rational mind. One reason is its eerily wasted space, this tribute to the dead that inevitably degenerates into ancestor worship as, on birthdays and anniversaries, humans of every faith and no faith at all brave whatever weather may that day threaten, in order to stand before these rows of silent stone markers, praying, yes, and remembering, of course, but very often actually speaking to the deceased, an oddly pagan ritual in which we engage, this shared pretense that the rotted corpses in warped wooden boxes are able to hear and understand us if we stand before their graves.The other reason a cemetery appeals to the irrational side is its obtrusive, irresistible habit of sneaking past the civilized veneer with which we cover the primitive planks of our childhood fears. When we are children, we know that what our parents insist is merely a tree branch blowing in the wind is really the gnarled fingertip of some horrific creature of the night, waiting outside the window, tapping, tapping, tapping, to let us know that, as soon as our parents close the door and sentence us to the gloom which they insist builds character, he will lift the sash and dart inside and…And there childhood imagination usually runs out, unable to give shape to the precise fears that have kept us awake and that will, in a few months, be forgotten entirely. Until we next visit a cemetery, that is, when, suddenly, the possibility of some terrifying creature of the night seems remarkably real.”

Stephen L. Carter book The Emperor of Ocean Park

Source: The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), Ch. 50, Again Old Town, I

Children, Fear, Faith, Imagination

“When, where, and how were you, Joseph Smith, first called? How old were you? and what were you qualifications? I was between fourteen and fifteen years of age. Had you been to college? No. Had you studied in any seminary of learning? No. Did you know how to read? Yes. How to write? Yes. Did you understand much about arithmetic? No. About grammar? No. Did you understand all the branches of education which are generally taught in our common schools? No. But yet you say the Lord called you when you were but fourteen or fifteen years of age? How did he call you? I will give you a brief history as it came from his own mouth. I have often heard him relate it. He was wrought upon by the Spirit of God, and felt the necessity of repenting of his sins and serving God. He retired from his father's house a little way, and bowed himself down in the wilderness, and called upon the name of the Lord. He was inexperienced, and in great anxiety and trouble of mind in regard to what church he should join. He had been solicited by many churches to join with them, and he was in great anxiety to know which was right. He pleaded with the Lord to give him wisdom on the subject; and while he was thus praying, he beheld a vision, and saw a light approaching him from the heavens; and as it came down and rested on the tops of the trees, it became more glorious; and as it surrounded him, his mind was immediately caught away from beholding surrounding objects. In this cloud of light he saw two glorious personages; and one, pointing to the other, said, "Behold my beloved son! hear ye him."”

Orson Pratt (1811–1881) Apostle of the LDS Church

Journal of Discourses 7:220 (August 14, 1859).
Joseph Smith Jr.'s First Vision

Wisdom, God, Age, Education

“What a wonderful and amazing Scheme have we here of the magnificent Vastness of the Universe! So many Suns, so many Earths, and every one of them stock’d with so many Herbs, Trees and Animals, and adorn’d with so many Seas and Mountains! And how must our wonder and admiration be encreased when we consider the prodigious distance and multitude of the Stars?”

Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher

Quam mirabilis igitur, quamque stupenda mundi amplitudo, & magnificentia jam mente concipienda est. Tot Soles, tot Terrae atque harum unaquaeque tot herbis, arboribus, animalibus, tot maribus, montibusque exornata. Et erit etiam unde augeatur admiratio, si quis ea quae de fixarum Stellarum distantia, & multitudine hisce addimus, pependerit. Book 2 http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/huygens/huygens_ct_en.htm, pp. 150-151 Cosmotheoros (1695; publ. 1698)

Mountain, Star, Universe, Sun

Quotes about trees page 14

Quotes about trees
page 14