Quotes about trees
page 15

“To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder.”

Jane Jacobs book Dark Age Ahead

Source: Dark Age Ahead (2004), Chapter Four, Science Abandoned, p. 64-65

Water, Science

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it fall, does it make a sound or not? Hector had read alot of books by then, he knew all the tricks and arguments of the philosophers. If someone makes a movie and no one sees it, does the movie exist or not?”

Paul Auster book The Book of Illusions

The Book of Illusions (2002)

Books, Reading

“(17.2. 1914) Beyond some bars, out of arm's reach, lies an objective [a banana]; on this side, in the background of the experiment room, is placed a sawn-off castor-oil bush, whose branches can be easily broken off. It is impossible to squeeze the tree through the railings, on account of its awkward shape; besides, only one of the bigger apes could drag it as far as the bars. Sultan is let in, does not immediately see the objective, and, looking about him indifferently, sucks one of the branches of the tree. But, his attention having been drawn to the objective, he approaches the bars, glances outside, the next moment turns round, goes straight to the tree, seizes a thin slender branch, breaks it off with a sharp jerk, runs back to the bars, and attains the objective. From the turning round upon the tree up to the grasping of the fruit with the broken-off branch, is one single quick chain of action, without the least 'hiatus', and without the slightest movement that does not, objectively considered, fit into the solution described.”

Wolfgang Köhler book The Mentality of Apes

Source: The Mentality of Apes, 1925, p. 94; As cited in: Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, 1964, p. 103

Jerk, Indifference

“In a cupboard filled with books he came across one with brightly colored pictures — it was a child's illustrated alphabet — A is for Archer Who shoots with a bow. B is for Boy, His first name is Joe. The pictures interested him greatly.
There were many apes with faces similar to his own, and further over in the book he found, under "M," some little monkeys such as he saw daily flitting through the trees of his primeval forest. But nowhere was pictured any of his own people; in all the book was none that resembled Kerchak, or Tublat, or Kala.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 6 : Jungle Battles

People, Books, Color, Boy

“There is no doubt that Sankara before him had set the wheel of inquiry by boldly declaring Advaita as the answers to all the questions posed by different Upanishads. He has tried to synthesize the approach and took up the Brahma sutras of Vyasa as the basic text for study. The Brahma sutras is an extraordinary text. Before Sage Vyasa a very great body of literature has accumulated mainly in the Upanishads, most of the time speaking in one voice about Brahama vidya and at the same time throwing in diverse suggestions It has grown up almost like a banyan tree with overgrown branches. Vyasa by reducing many of these concepts into short and crisp sutras has provided behind each sutra an ocean of knowledge. It is impossible to understand the whole body of knowledge in a unitary way. Sankara brought in a cohesion. He was close to the Vedic ideals in point of time …”

R. Nagaswamy (1930) Indian academic

"Ramanuja Myth & Reality A Critical Study Of Ramanujas Life & Works

Way, Literature, Understanding, Question

“.. the word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers.... one of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'....(abstraction was) not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

Willem de Kooning, MOMA Bull., pp. 4, 6; as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 104.
1980's

Art, Mountain, Light, Painting

“We know that this animal [the giraffe], the tallest of mammals, dwells in the interior of Africa, in places where the soil, almost always arid and without herbage, obliges it to browse on trees and to strain itself continuously to reach them. This habit sustained for long, has had the result in all members of its race that the forelegs have grown longer than the hind legs and that its neck has become so stretched, that the giraffe, without standing on its hind legs, lifts its head to a height of six meters.”

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck book Philosophie Zoologique

On sait que cet animal, le plus grand des mammifères, habite l'intérieur de l'Afrique, et qu'il vit dans des lieux où la terre, presque toujours aride et sans herbage, l'oblige de brouter le feuillage des arbres, et de s'efforcer continuellement d'y atteindre. Il est résulté de cette habitude soutenue depuis longtemps, dans tous les individus de sa race, que ses jambes de devant sont devenues plus longues que celles de derrière, et que son col s'est tellement allongé, que la girafe, sans se dresser sur ses jambes de derrière, élève sa tête et atteint à six mètres de hauteur
Philosophie Zoologique, Vol. I (1809), pp. 256–257; translation taken from The Classics of Science: A Study of Twelve Enduring Scientific Works (1984) by Derek Gjertsen, p. 316.

Animals

“I stand at the window and see a house, trees, sky.
Theoretically I might say there were 327 brightnesses and nuances of colour. Do I have "327"? No. I have sky, house, and trees. It is impossible to achieve "327 " as such. And yet even though such droll calculation were possible and implied, say, for the house 120, the trees 90, the sky 117 -- I should at least have this arrangement and division of the total, and not, say, 127 and 100 and 100; or 150 and 177.
The concrete division which I see is not determined by some arbitrary mode of organization lying solely within my own pleasure; instead I see the arrangement and division which is given there before me. And what a remarkable process it is when some other mode of apprehension does succeed! I gaze for a long time from my window, adopt after some effort the most unreal attitude possible. And I discover that part of a window sash and part of a bare branch together compose an N.”

Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) Co-founder of Gestalt psychology

Max Wertheimer (1923). "Laws of organization in perceptual forms." Translation published in W. D. Ellis (Ed.), A source book of Gestalt psychology, pp. 71–94. London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1938. (Original title: Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt II); Online http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Wertheimer/Forms/forms.htm at psychclassics.yorku.ca, accessed 03.2017.

Pleasure, Lying, Effort, Time

“The more we devote ourselves to observing animals and their behaviour, the more we love them, on seeing how gready they care for their young; in such a context, we cannot even contemplate cruelty to a wolf. Leibnitz put the grub he had been observing back on the tree with its leaf, lest he should be guilty of doing any harm to it. It upsets a man to destroy such a creature for no reason, and this tenderness is subsequendy transferred to man.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Part II, pp. 212-213
Lectures on Ethics (1924)

Love, Wolf, Animals

“This vast pile of natural beauty, those crags and fir trees and hovering hawks, those echoing ravines and vast tumblings of snow and earth, brought me swiftly to the understanding of my own insignificance and, indeed, the insignificance of all human struggle.”

Michael Moorcock book The City in the Autumn Stars

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 2 (pp. 194-195)

Beauty, Understanding, Nature

“All this countryside [along the Seine] was calm and peaceful. The strongest emotions I have experienced on the high roads or on the hill tops whence I could see down into the valleys on tot he roofs of houses which I felt I could reach out and touch with my hand.. And then I was tempted to begin painting [c. 1893 - 17 years old]... I composed instinctively and awkwardly. I applied colors with only one idea which justified everything: to express what I felt. I painted hesitantly and exclusively for myself and no one else. It seemed to me that water, sky, clouds and trees understood the happiness they gave me.”

Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958) French painter

Source: Quotes dated, Dangerous Corner', 1929, p. 46

Peace, Color, Idea, Water

“The history of most fictions would be far stranger than the fictions themselves; but it would be a dark and sad chronicle. Half the works that constitute the charm of our leisure, that give their own interest to the long November evening, or add to the charm of a summer noon beneath the greenwood tree, are the offspring of poverty and of pain. … How often is the writer obliged to put his own trouble, his suffering, or his sorrow aside, to finish the task! The hand may tremble, the eyes fill with unbidden tears, and the temples throb with feverish pain, yet how often is there some hard and harsh necessity, which says, "the work must be done.””

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

Literary Remains

Pain, Sadness, History, Tear

“If I absolutely had to choose, I would take Mugabe in preference to Smith, though. I couldn't stand Smith. I thought he was a man who saw every tree in the wood but couldn't see the wood… He was a really stupid man, Smith; a bigoted, stupid man.”

Ian Smith (1919–2007) Prime Minister of Rhodesia

Lord Carrington, as quoted in Heidi Holland, Dinner with Mugabe, Penguin Books; Reprint edition (5 Feb 2009), ISBN 0143026186.
About

Stupidity

“A man contains all that is needed to make up a tree; likewise, a tree contains all that is needed to make up a man. Thus, finally, all things meet in all things, but we need a Prometheus to distill it.”

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

The Other World (1657)

“to show that [the success of my portray-] photographs was not due to subject matter – not to special trees or faces, or interiors, to special privileges – clouds were there for everyone... I wanted to photograph clouds to find out what I had learned in forty years about photography. Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life... My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs that unless one has eyes and sees, they won't be seen – and still everyone will never forget them having once looked at them.”

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) American photographer

'How I came to Photograph Clouds', Alfred Stieglitz, in 'Amateur Photographer and Photography', (19 September 1923): 255.
about his new subject: 'clouds' in his long series 'Equivalents' he started in 1922

Life, Learning, Success, Forgetting

“Sometimes, if you stand very still in the shadows of those places, you can hear songs on the wind, whispers in the trees. That is why I travel.”

Valya Dudycz Lupescu (1974) American writer

The Silence of Trees (2010)

Travel

“I remember stealing fruit from our neighbour's mango trees. More than the act of stealing, I remember the neighbours being horrified that a singer's daughter should step into their compound. I would be thrown out. Incidentally, the same people invite me over to their house today and call me 'Gangubai' with great respect. There are so many incidents that I will never forget--I remember singing for the Belgaum Congress session which was attended by Gandhiji--my only paranoia throughout the programme was that I would be asked to eat my food separately.”

Gangubai Hangal (1913–2009) Indian singer

In On Gangubai Hangal by Sabina Sehgal Computer Science & Engineering - University of Washington https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mausam/gangubai.html

People, Food, Singing, Housing

“See the light ram through the gaps in the land.
Many an Aborigine's mistaken for a tree
'Til you near him on the motorway
And the tree begin to breathe.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Dreaming (1982)

Light

“I remember, I remember
The fir-trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now 'tis little joy
To know I'm farther off from Heaven
Than when I was a boy.”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

I Remember, I Remember, st. 4.
1820s

Boy, Thinking, Joy

“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.”

Thomas Jackson (1824–1863) Confederate general

Last words (May 10, 1863); as quoted in "Stonewall Jackson's Last Days" by Joe D. Haines, Jr. in America's Civil War

“Some men dream of wealth and power. I tell of days. Of woods taking me where they wanted to go, hawthorns scarlet with October, the lacy loveliness of hemlocks, old lanes gold with Autumn, fall colors like stained glass showing through the leaded lines of black branches, each tree a love, each leaf a now, the dry-bone look of maple twigs in winter, the silent snow. For more than seventy Indian summers I have begged each one not to go, even as I spoke, the leaves showered down around me.”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

Grouse Along the Tramroad (1986)

Love, Men, Dreams, Color

“With whisper of her mellowing grain,
With treble of brook and bud and tree,
Earth joys for ever to sustain
The bass eternal of the sea.”

Roden Noel (1834–1894) English poet

"Beatrice", in Beatrice, and other Poems (1868).

Joy, Sea

“The Duke of Devonshire issues a circular applying for subscriptions to oppose this Bill, and he charges us with the robbery of God. Why, does he not know—of course he knows—that the very foundations of his fortune are laid deep in sacrilege, fortunes built out of desecrated shrines and pillaged altars…I say that charges of this kind brought against a whole people…ought not to be brought by those whose family trees are laden with the fruits of sacrilege. I am not complaining that ancestors of theirs did it, but they are still in the enjoyment of the same property, and they are subscribing out of that property to leaflets which attack us and call us thieves. What is their story? Look at the whole story of the pillage of the Reformation. They robbed the Catholic Church, they robbed the monasteries, they robbed the altars, they robbed the almshouses, they robbed the poor, and they robbed the dead. Then they come here when we are trying to seek, at any rate to recover some part of this pillaged property for the poor for whom it was originally given, and they venture, with hands dripping with the fat of sacrilege, to accuse us of robbery of God.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1912/may/16/second-reading-fourth-days-debate in the House of Commons (12 May 1912) on the Bill to disestablish the Anglican church in Wales Chancellor of the Exchequer

God, People, Family, Parting

“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.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

The Sun My Heart (1996)

Feeling, Nature, Help

“That was a day of delight and wonder.
While lying the shade of the maple trees under—
He felt the soft breeze at its frolicksome play;
He smelled the sweet odor of newly mown hay.”

Thomas Dunn English (1819–1902) American state and federal politician

Under the Trees, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 494.

Lying

“Why We See Things and Not the Holes Between Them. We can now attempt an answer to the question why we do so. Two of the factors of organization which we have so far discussed seem to me to be the most important causes of this effect. In the first place, the segregation and unification which occurs will separate areas of different degrees of internal articulation, and according to our law, the more highly articulated ones will become figures, the rest fusing together to form the ground. Look at any landscape photograph. You see the shape of the things, the mountains, and trees and buildings, but not of the sky.”

Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) German psychologist

Source: Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, p. 208-9

Law, Mountain, Question

“in silence through the night
close to the City of Realisations;
it is here one finds the way…
…Mount Orison
the City of Days
the Tree of the lost
he journeys on…
…north of his love
a road through a valley of darkness
the islands that are not of this world
he journeys on to find his love…”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Song lyrics, Amarantine (2005)

Love, World, Way, Silence

“I believe that the fight against substance addictions is very important and is a duty of the state and society, but this fight must be carried out in a deliberate way not to produce large amounts of splinters hurting a lot of people around while only chopping small trees.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Vetulai, Jerzy (20 February 2009): Wódka groźniejsza niż egzotyczne ziółka http://www.monar.net.pl/Article8247.html. Gazeta Wyborcza (in Polish).

People, Way, Fight, Hurt

“The part assigned to this country in the 'Good Fight of Man' is the total overthrow of the spirit of caste. Luther fought it in the form of ecclesiastical despotism; our fathers fought it as political tyranny; we have hitherto encountered it entrenched in a system of personal slavery. But in all these forms it is the same old spirit of the denial of equal rights. Martin Luther, the monk, had exactly the same right to his religious faith that Giovanni de' Medici, the pope, had to his. Galileo had the same right to hold and teach his scientific theories that the Church doctors had to teach theirs. Patrick Henry, a British subject, had the same right to refuse to be taxed without representation that Lord North, another British subject, had. Robert Small, one of the American people, had exactly the same right to vote upon the same qualifications with other citizens that the President has or the Chief Justice of the United States. The Inquisition in Italy, aristocratic privilege in England, chattel slavery or unfair political exclusion in the United States, are only fruits ripened upon the tree of caste. Our swords have cut off some of the fruit, but the tree and its roots remain, and now that our swords are turned into plough-shares and our Dahlgrens and Parrotts into axes and hoes, our business is to take care that the tree and all its roots are thoroughly cut down and dug up, and burned utterly away in the great blaze of equal rights.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

People, Faith, Justice, Business

“Making money out of paper, making paper out of trees
We’re making so much money we can hardly breathe”

Todd Snider (1966) American singer

Stuck on a Corner
Peace Queer (2008)

Money

“Just as the root feeds the tree, so humility feeds the soul. The spirit of humility is sweeter than honey, and whoever is fed by this sweetness produces fruit.”
Sicut radix portat arborem, sic humilitas animam. Spiritus humilitatis est super mel dulcis, quo qui regitur dulcia poma facit.

Anthony of Padua (1195–1231) Franciscan

Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Part II: De bonae arboris fructificatione et de malae arboris excisione, par. 10)
Sermons

Soul

“He would not journey without a foot.
He would not breed nuts without trees,
Like seeking for ants in the heath.
Like an instrument of foolish spoil,
Like the retinue of an army without a head,
Like feeding the unsheltered on lichen.”

Taliesin (534–599) Welsh bard

Book of Taliesin (c. 1275?), The Fold of the Bards

“A question arises regarding the angels who dwell with us, serve us and protect us, whether their joys are equal to those of the angels in heaven, or whether they are diminished by the fact that they protect and serve us. No, they are certainly not; for the work of the angels is the will of God, and the will of God is the work of the angels; their service to us does not hinder their joy nor their working. If God told an angel to go to a tree and pluck caterpillars off it, the angel would be quite ready to do so, and it would be his happiness, if it were the will of God.”

Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) German theologian

Sermon IV : True Hearing
Meister Eckhart’s Sermons (1909)

God, Angels, Question, Joy

“… I believe it to be a duty of the General Convention of Harrisburg, not only to support the wool growers and wool manufacturers, but to lay the root at the axe of the tree, by declaring the system of Adam Smith to be erroneous – by declaring war against it on the part of the American System – …”

Friedrich List (1789–1846) German economist with dual American citizenship

Letter I
Outlines of American Political Economy (1827)

War, Support, Parting

“I was kind of a tomboy climbing trees so it never crossed my mind, no.”

Rachel Weisz (1970) English actress

Rachel said when asked if the role had been a childhood fantasy of hers. Source: hellomagazine.com http://www.hellomagazine.com/celebrities/2013030911512/rachel-weisz-us-interview/

“More towers must yet be built—more towers destroyed—
Great rocks hoisted in air;
And he must seek his bread in high pale sunlight
With gulls about him, and clouds just over his eyes...
And so he did not mention his dream of falling
But drank his coffee in silence, and heard in his ears
That horrible whistle of wind, and felt his breath
Sucked out of him, and saw the tower flash by
And the small tree swell beneath him...
He patted his boy on the head, and kissed his wife,
Looked quickly around the room, to remember it,—
And so went out... For once, he forgot his pail.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Dreams, Boy, Coffee, Kiss

“That's my house and that's my car
That's my dog in my backyard
There's the window to the room
Where she lays her pretty headI planted that tree out by the fence
Not long after we moved in
That's my kids and that's my wife
Who's that man, runnin' my life?”

Toby Keith (1961) American country music singer and actor

Who's That Man.
Song lyrics, Boomtown (1994)

Life, Dogs, Cars, Housing

“During the thirty years I have spent abroad I have felt I was more privileged than my Western colleagues, whether writers or teachers of literature, for events both recent and long past took in my mind a sharply delineated, precise form. Western audiences confronted with poems or novels written in Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary, or with films produced there, possibly intuit a similarly sharpened consciousness, in a constant struggle against limitations imposed by censorship. Memory thus is our force, it protects us against a speech entwining upon itself like the ivy when it does not find a support on a tree or a wall.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

Nobel lecture (8 December 1980)

Literature, Support, Teachers, Memory

“He's like a fish up a tree.”

Paul Merson (1968) English footballer and manager

Interview on Rileys' News http://www.rileys.co.uk/news/240.

Fish

“Many a time I have sat in the jungle in Central India watching a bait, in the form of a bullock or calf tied to a tree, awaiting the arrival of the lord of the forest, and put there as a trap to entice him to his doom. On this occasion, I have exactly the same feelings as those of the miserable animal whom I have so often looked upon in that position, and, if I compare myself to that bait, I may compare my right hon. Friend the Member for Epping (Mr. Churchill) to the tiger. I hope that hon. Members and the right hon. Gentleman himself will remember, however, that there is waiting for the tiger a pair of lynx eyes and a sure and safe rifle to ensure his ultimate fate.”

Rab Butler (1902–1982) British politician

Speech on Indian Constitutional Reform http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1933/mar/29/indian-constitutional-reform (29 March 1933).

Fate, Hope, Feeling, Time

“Strong families value their extended family, particularly grandparents. In one study of college students, a majority thought their interactions with grandparents reflected high family strengths. It’s important to create continuity between generations, passing along traditions and making roots ever stronger, so the tree continues to reach for the sun.”

Joyce Brothers (1927–2013) Joyce Brothers

10 Keys to a Strong Family (2002)

Family, Study, Strong, Sun

“Grieving, yet somehow unbending, steadfast, unafraid, the voice rose through the evening like memory, and a gust of wind blew up from the river, dimming the song, rustling the trees, then died and became still. I’ll lay in de grave and stretch out my arms … Suddenly the voice ceased, and all was quiet.
Then what I done was wrong, Lord? I said. And if what I done was wrong, is there no redemption?
I raised my eyes upward but there was no answer, only the gray impermeable sky and night falling fast over Jerusalem.”

William Styron book The Confessions of Nat Turner

Part I : Judgment Day
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)

Memory, Night

“The invention of the printing press probably marks the beginning of the decline of civilization. Once you have it, science follows close behind. Next thing you know the idiots have better weaponry. Then atom bombs. Meantime, social organization becomes increasingly dependent on technology, which becomes increasingly vulnerable to error or sabotage. If we can judge by our own experience, it looks as if you get the printing press, then about a thousand years. After that it’s back to the trees.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 27 (p. 243)

Error, Science, Dependency

“Hindus have a saying that even a castor plant can pass as a tree in a land devoid of real trees. Jesus can pass as God only among people who have never known what constitutes Godhood.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Source: History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

God, People

“Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.
Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality.Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself,
So the weary travelers may find repose in the lie.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"Child of Europe" (1946), trans. Jan Darowski
Daylight (1953)

Truth, Lie, Travel

“The natural born reason we didn't git no yew-ranium when we crosses the li'l yew tree and the gee-ranium is on account of cause we didn't have no geiger counter.”

Walt Kelly (1913–1973) American cartoonist

Dr. Howland Owl
Pogo comic strip (1948 - 1975), Others

Nature

“All the efforts of several hundred thousand people, crowded in a small space, to disfigure the land on which they lived; all the stone they covered it with to keep it barren; how so diligently every sprouting blade of grass was removed; all the smoke of coal and naphtha; all the cutting down of trees and driving off of cattle could not shut out the spring, even from the city. The sun was shedding its light; the grass, revivified, was blooming forth, where it was left uncut, not only on the greenswards of the boulevard, but between the flag-stones, and the birches, poplars and wild-berry trees were unfolding their viscous leaves; the limes were unfolding their buds; the daws, sparrows and pigeons were joyfully making their customary nests, and the flies were buzzing on the sun-warmed walls. Plants, birds, insects and children were equally joyful. Only men—grown-up men—continued cheating and tormenting themselves and each other. People saw nothing holy in this spring morning, in this beauty of God's world—a gift to all living creatures—inclining to peace, good-will and love, but worshiped their own inventions for imposing their will on each other.”

Leo Tolstoy book Resurrection

Source: Resurrection (1899), Ch. 1

Love, Men, God, Children

“Dear Joe The letter said The windows rattle without you, you bastard. The trees are the cause, rattling in the wind, you jerk, the wild scraping those leaves and twigs against my window. They'll keep on doing this, you terrible husband, and slowly wear away our entire apartment.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Adverbs (2006), Naturally

Jerk

“Lemurs are close to the ancestral stock from which all primates arose, and I am happy to think that one of my own ancestors, 50 million years ago, was a little tree-dwelling creature not so dissimilar to the lemurs of today. I love their leaping vitality, their inquisitive nature.”

Oliver Sacks (1933–2015) British neurologist and writer

My Periodic Table, New York Times, 24 July 2015

Love, Nature, Thinking, Happiness

“And I started wondering who he was going to be
And I thought heaven help us if hes anything like me.
He'll probably climb a tree to tall and ride hes bike to fast;
End up every summer wearin something in a cast.
He's gonna throw a ball and break some glass in a window down the street.
He's gonna get in trouble, oh he's gonna get in fights.
I'm gonna lose my temper and some sleep.
It's safe to say that I'm gonna get my payback if he's anything like me.”

Brad Paisley (1972) American country music singer

Anything Like Me, written by Brad Paisley, Chris DuBois, and Dave Turnbull.
Song lyrics, American Saturday Night (2009)

Sleep, Help, Fight, Summer

“I want to be free, independent. Free of all coercion. Free of any need to rely on other people. I have no credit cards, nor do I want any. I toss the cash on the table. I leave others in peace and I want to be left in peace. I spend my nights sleeping on the ground in the forest. I embrace trees as I have done all my life. I smell their bark and kiss it. I lay my face on the moss and breathe in the spicy aroma of fruitfulness as if I were lying on a woman's belly.”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

Source: Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996), p. 305

Life, People, Peace, Lying

“[Translated]: The tree of liberty only grows when watered by the blood of tyrants.”

Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac (1755–1841) French politician, freemason, journalist, and one of the most notorious members of the National Convention …

L'arbre de la liberté ne croit qu'arrosé par le sang des tyrans.
Speech in the Convention Nationale, 1792.

Water

“If poisonous minerals, and if that tree,
Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us,
If lecherous goats, if serpents envious
Cannot be damned; alas; why should I be?”

John Donne book Holy Sonnets

No. 9, line 1
Holy Sonnets (1633)

Death

“You gave your body to the lonely,
They took your clothes.
You gave up a wife and a family
You gave your ghost.
To be alone with me.
To be alone with me
You went up on a tree.
I've never met a man who loved me.”

Sufjan Stevens (1975) American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist

"To Be Alone with You"
Lyrics, Seven Swans (2004)

Love, Family, Clothes

“Ralph waved the conch.
"Shut up! Wait! Listen!"
He went on in the silence, borne on in his triumph.
"There’s another thing. We can help them to find us. If a ship comes near the island they may not notice us. So we must make smoke on top of the mountain. We must make a fire."
"A fire! Make a fire!"
At once half the boys were on their feet. Jack clamored among them, the conch forgotten.
"Come on! Follow me!"
The space under the palm trees was full of noise and movement. Ralph was on his feet too, shouting for quiet, but no one heard him. All at once the crowd swayed toward the island and was gone— following Jack. Even the tiny children went and did their best among the leaves and broken branches. Ralph was left, holding the conch, with no one but Piggy.”

William Golding book Lord of the Flies

Source: Lord of the Flies (1954), Ch. 2: Fire on the Mountain

Children, Mountain, Boy, Silence

“We lived in places that we never knew.
We could not name the birds perched on our sill,
Or see the trees we cut down for our view.
What we possessed we always chose to kill."We claimed the earth but did not hear her claim,
And when we died, they laid us on her breast,
But she refuses us — until we earn
Forgiveness from the lives we dispossessed.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"A California Requiem"
Poetry, Interrogations at Noon (2001)

Forgiveness, Bird

“I am quite incapable of doing them [making landscapes], even the shadow. My trees look like spinach and my sea like heaven knows what.... [the Mediterranean landscape was] the devil to paint, precisely because it is so beautiful.”

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) French painter

young Lautrec comments his own paintings of the landscape, when he was c. 15 years old.
Source: 1879-1884, T-Lautrec, by Henri Perruchot, p. 46 - remark to his friend Etienne Devismes - in Nice, 1879

Beauty, Painting, Sea

“Without the Christian explanation of original sin, the seemingly silly story of Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there was no explanation of conflict. At all.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Knowledge, Evil

“So feast your eyes now
On mimic star and moon-cold bauble:
Worlds may wither unseen,
But the Christmas Tree is a tree of fable,
A phoenix in evergreen”

Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972) English poet

The Christmas Tree (1953)

World, Star, Christmas

“There had been rain but it had stopped, and the light from a luminously clouded sky was pewter-bright, and puddles on the road were shivering in the wind, and the rooks above the trees in St Anne's Park were being tossed about the air like scraps of charred paper.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville on the birth of his dark twin, Benjamin Black (2011)

Light

“So much to learn!
Old Nature's ways
Of glee and gloom with rapt amaze
To study, probe, and paint – brown earth,
Salt sea, blue heavens, their tilth and dearth,
Birds, grasses, trees – the natural things
That throb or grope or poise on wings.”

Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, lin…

Richard Eugene Burton, Memorial Day, And Other Poems (1897), 'So Much to Learn', p. 8
Misattributed

Way, Nature, Bird, Study

“Saddam was the creation of outsiders. He was created, strengthened, and kept by international force. He is like a man on a tree and the tree will be cut: he will fall down. The formation of a new front will inspire the Iraqi people to intensify the struggle, to give heart to people who before were faced with the whole world supporting Saddam.”

Jalal Talabani (1933–2017) Iraqi politician

Statement made as the then-General Secretary of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PKU), on Iraqi opposition leaders — reported in George D. Moffett III (September 20, 1990) "Iraqi Exiles Make a Try at Unity - Saddam's isolation spurs varied opponents to shelve differences and plot his overthrow", Christian Science Monitor, p. 4.

People, World, Support, Heart

“The trees are alone, the clouds are alone. Everything is alone when I am alone.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

El árbol está solo, la nube está sola. Todo está solo cuando yo estoy solo.
Voces (1943)

“Where'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade,
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade:
Where'er you tread, the blushing flow'rs shall rise,
And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.”

Alexander Pope Pastorals

Summer, line 73.
Pastorals (1709)

“The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains — mountain-dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops.”

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

July 1890, pages 315-316
John of the Mountains, 1938

Men, World, Mountain, Nature

“When we can get beyond that smoky world, there, out in the country we may still see the works of our fathers yet alive amidst the very nature they were wrought into, and of which they are so completely a part: for there indeed if anywhere, in the English country, in the days when people cared about such things, was there a full sympathy between the works of man, and the land they were made for: — the land is a little land; too much shut up within the narrow seas, as it seems, to have much space for swelling into hugeness: there are no great wastes overwhelming in their dreariness, no great solitudes of forests, no terrible untrodden mountain-walls: all is measured, mingled, varied, gliding easily one thing into another: little rivers, little plains, swelling, speedily- changing uplands, all beset with handsome orderly trees; little hills, little mountains, netted over with the walls of sheep- walks: all is little; yet not foolish and blank, but serious rather, and abundant of meaning for such as choose to seek it: it is neither prison nor palace, but a decent home.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

The Decorative Arts (1877)

People, World, Home, Mountain

“Dr Williams’s book is about a number of nineteenth-century French writers who caught syphilis and probably died of paresis. They are Baudelaire, Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant and Daudet. A similar book could probably be written about nineteenth-century British writers, including such unlikely victims of syphilis as John Keats and Edward Lear. People were not so frightened of the disease as we are. Few physicians saw the connection between cerebral degeneration and the primary chancre: when the secondary stage of the infection had healed, it was generally assumed that everything was over and lightning would not strike the tree again. This was Baudelaire’s belief. One could even rejoice at picking up the pox: it was not merely an inoculation; it advertised one’s virility to the world….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

People, Books, World, Disease

“As to our garden and yard, we have all the woods. And the wilderness is our only cloister, for our house is like an oak tree planted therein.”

Théodore Guérin (1798–1856) Catholic saint and nun from France

First Journal of Travel (1840)

Housing

“Trees don't grow to the sky.”

Louis Rukeyser (1933–2006) American journalist

On the inevitablility of down markets as well as up markets
July 26, 2002, Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street

“The tale survives of two men
Who fell in love "at first sight";
Who shared everything
In unbounded intimacy
Including the pillow
And the red embroidered coverlet
Which had been in the family
For generations.
Whether they had bad days,
Domestic arguments
Or inappropriate dreams
We do not know –
No doubt such burrs
Were worked away by time
Polishing its story;
How they found each other
And lived together all their lives,
And died on the same day,
And were buried by the grieving town
On Mount Luofo's peak
With their pillow and red coverlet;
And a pine tree grew
Out of the grave
Like the character for longevity
And true love.Such is the legend.
I like to think of them,
Pan Zhang and Wang Zhangxian,
In the crowd of well-wishers
Waiting in the April sunshine,
Yes, under white cherry trees
In full bloom, for us
Here and now, on this day
Early in the century,
In our very best suits and ties,
With our new rings
Growing warm on our fingers
Like keepsakes of light
Saved from the stars.”

Nick Drake (poet) (1961) British writer

From the Song Dynasty

Love, Men, Family, Dreams

“The White man never guessed at what the Red man saw and heard and felt. The White man brought death and emptiness to this place. The White man cut down wise old trees with much to tell; young saplings with many lifetimes of life ahead; and the White man never asked, Will you be glad to make a lodgehouse for me and my tribe? Hack and cut and chop and burn, that was the White man’s way. Take from the forest, take from the land, take from the river, but put nothing back. The White man killed animals he didn’t need, animals that did him no harm; yet if a bear woke hungry in the winter and took so much as a single young pig, the White man hunted him down and killed him in revenge. He never felt the balance of the land at all.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Red Prophet (1988), Chapter 2.

Life, Death, Way, Revenge

“From his hole so wet and drenching
a pike rose up to tree to sing

when through the greyish net of clouds
first gleam of day was seen
and at the lake the lapping waves
woke up with joyous mean
the pike rose to the spruce's crone
to take a bite at reddish cone”

Aaro Hellaakoski (1893–1952) Finnish writer, poet, geographer and teacher

Aaro Hellaakoski, "The Pike's Song," (1927), Leevi Lehto (transl.), in: Leevi Lehto. Leevi Lehto. Finnish poetry: then and now, January 2005. Published online at upenn.edu. Accessed 20-03-2013

Singing

“My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still.
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

" After Apple Picking http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/after-apple-picking-3/" 1910s

“On the question of the gentlemanliness of the debate, I'm reminded that in the Congress, just before the Civil War, the Senator from New Hampshire, I think, made an anti-slavery speech, and a Senator from Mississippi, not Jefferson Davis, invited him to come down to Mississippi to make that speech, promising to see that he was hanged from the highest tree in the forest. The Senator from New Hampshire invited the Senator from Mississippi to come to New Hampshire where he would be given a respectful hearing in every township in that State.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002)

War, Question, Thinking

“[T]he 1919 uprising is memorialized in the North without a public holiday as an example of how badly things go when a nation lacks a parental leader. This doesn’t stop propaganda from claiming the protests originated under the influence of Kim Hyŏng-jik, the father of Kim Il Sung, who himself impressed everyone at the age of six by … but never mind. The Blue House is unlikely to quibble with this version of history on the day itself. With these meshing tendencies and measures the ruling camp evidently hopes to bond with the Kim regime over a shared anti-Japanese tradition, to present today’s ROK and DPRK as branches of the same Shanghai tree, put nationalism above liberal-democratic principles, and minimize opposition to all these things. No less obvious is the larger goal.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Confederation Again (July 2018)

Age, Hope, History, Parent

“I grew up as a tomboy. I was always barefoot, running races with the guys on the block, climbing trees, and beating kids up.”

Edie Falco (1963) American actress

Interview with Bruce Fretts, Entertainment Weekly (January 15, 1999), http://www.hwwilson.com/_home/bios/1999043105.htm

Guy

“There was one artist who wrote as beautifully as he painted. That was Hokusai - He speaks for all artists, whether they are painters or not. [He wrote]: "I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy three I have at last caught every aspect of nature-birds, fish, animals, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further. And I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime, and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life."”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Reflections (1981)

Love, Life, Secret, Age

“When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side…At last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them [deleted: the end we did not see] along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them; some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.”

Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) English author, poet and diarist

April 15, 1802
Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is based on this description.
Diaries

Beauty, Water, Change, Dance

“To hear never-heard sounds,
To see never-seen colors and shapes,
To try to understand the imperceptible
Power pervading the world;
To fly and find pure ethereal substances
That are not of matter
But of that invisible soul pervading reality.
To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul;
To be a lantern in the darkness
Or an umbrella in a stormy day;
To feel much more than know.
To be the eyes of an eagle, slope of a mountain;
To be a wave understanding the influence of the moon;
To be a tree and read the memory of the leaves;
To be an insignificant pedestrian on the streets
Of crazy cities watching, watching, and watching.
To be a smile on the face of a woman
And shine in her memory
As a moment saved without planning.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Task of a Poet http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21367/Task_of_a_Poet From the poems written in English

World, Smile, Color, Feeling

“Those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk
Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear.”

James Dickey (1923–1997) American writer

The Heaven of Animals (l. 29–34).
The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

Life, Fear, Feeling, Knowledge

“When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.”

Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) English poet

Song, st. 1 (1862).

Sadness, Grass, Singing, Dead

“I was young and could not see the weaponry my ancestors had left for me, the shield in the tall brown grass, the ax lying right next to the tree.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Source: The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2008), p. 41.

Lying, Grass

“Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.”

Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) American philosopher and logician

Philosophy of Logic (1970)
1970s

Truth

“Thats the trouble. all i wanted was a tumble in the hay. oh, boy, i said. ill bet that cute thing is fun and games. what he doesn't know about the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees, i can sure teach him”

Alice Borchardt (1939–2007) American fiction writer

The Raven Warrior

Game, Boy, Flowers, Bird

“He [the Dalai Lama] asked me for my participation and I rejected the plan to make a kind of sculpture there in this old way, to make in a kind of special place this special modern sculpture. I told him that my idea would be this time to plant seven thousand oaks in Kassel, seven thousand trees. And to mark every tree with a little stone, so that everybody after three, two, five or six hundred years can still see that in 1982 there was an activity. After the radical destruction of the forests here in Germany for all this technological nonsense, that there was an impulse that came in the same time, to plant seven thousand oaks. This is such a kind of activity during the Documenta [in Kassel], that has to do with the 'Documenta', but is a real other thing in the conventional understanding of art.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Source: 1980's, Interview with Louwrien Wijers, 1981, p. 185 - Beuys' statement on planting seven thousand oaks in Kassel, in 'Joseph Beuys and the Dalai Lama'

Art, Way, Idea, Understanding

“Plants and plant-eaters co-evolved. And plants aren't the passive partners in the chain of terrestrial life. Hence today's Pop Ecology movement is quite wrong in believing that plants are happy to fill their role as fodder for herbivores in a harmonious and perfectly balanced ecosystem. A birch tree doesn't feel cosmic fulfillment when a moose munches its leaves; the tree species, in fact, evolves to fight the moose, to keep the animal's munching lips away from vulnerable young leaves and twigs. In the final analysis, the merciless hand of natural selection will favor the birch genes that make the tree less and less palatable to the moose in generation after generation. No plant species could survive for long by offering itself as unprotected fodder.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 179
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life, Feeling, Nature, Animals

“Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

" Tree at My Window http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/tree-at-my-window-2/" (1928) 1920s

Night

“How shall I tell what I saw? The towers are not all broken — here and there one still stands, like a great tree in a forest, and the birds nest high. But the towers themselves look blind, for the gods are gone. I saw a fishhawk, catching fish in the river. I saw a little dance of white butterflies over a great heap of broken stones and columns. I went there and looked about me — there was a carved stone with cut — letters, broken in half. I can read letters but I could not understand these. They said UBTREAS. There was also the shattered image of a man or a god. It had been made of white stone and he wore his hair tied back like a woman's. His name was ASHING, as I read on the cracked half of a stone. I thought it wise to pray to ASHING, though I do not know that god.”

Stephen Vincent Benét book By the Waters of Babylon

Source: By the Waters of Babylon (1937)

God, Understanding, Bird, Fish

“No man, the proverb says, will hesitate
To gather firewood from a fallen tree.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Canto XXXVII, stanza 106 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

“If I love you—
I never behave like a climbing trumpet vine
Using your high branches to show myself off;
If I love you—
I never mimic infatuated little birds
Repeating monotonous songs into the shadows,
Nor do I look at all like a wellspring
Sending out its cooling consolation all year round,
Or just another perilous crag
Augmenting your height, setting off your prestige.
Nor like the sunlight
Or even spring rain.
No, these are not enough.
I would be a kapok tree by your side
Standing with you—
both of us shaped like trees.
Our roots hold hands underground,
Our leaves touch in the clouds.
As a gust of wind passes by
We salute each other
And not a soul
Understands our language.
You have your bronze boughs and iron trunk
Like knives and swords,
Also like halberds;
I have my red flowers
Like heavy sighs,
Also like heroic torches.
We share cold waves, storms and thunderbolts;
Together we savor fog, haze and rainbows.
We seem to always live apart,
But actually depend upon each other forever.
This has to be called extraordinary love.
Faith resides in it:
Love—
I love not only your sublime body
But the space you occupy,
The land beneath your feet.”

Shu Ting (1952) Chinese writer

"To the Oak Tree" [ 致橡树 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APZjf9K6KX0, Zhi xiangshu] (27 March 1977), in The Red Azalea: Chinese Poetry Since the Cultural Revolution, ed. Edward Morin, trans. Fang Dai and Dennis Ding (University of Hawaii Press, 1990), ISBN 978-0824813208, pp. 102–103.

Love, Faith, Soul, Spring

“Suicide evokes revulsion with horror, because everything in nature seeks to preserve itself: a damaged tree, a living body, an animal; and in man, then, is freedom, which is the highest degree of life, and constitutes the worth of it, to become now a principium for self-destruction? This is the most horrifying thing imaginable. For anyone who has already got so far as to be master, at any time, over his own life, is also master over the life of anyone else; for him, the door stands open to every crime, and before he can be seized he is ready to spirit himself away out of the world. So suicide evokes horror, in that a man thereby puts himself below the beasts. We regard a suicide as a carcase, whereas we feel pity for one who meets his end through fate.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Part II, p. 146
Lectures on Ethics (1924)

Life, Fate, World, Feeling

“The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. … The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“November: A Mighty Fortress”, p. 77.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "November: Axe-in-Hand," "November: A Mighty Fortress," and "December: Pines above the Snow"

Disease, Animals, Dead

“(Man on television) The investment firm of Smith Barney: they make money the old-fashioned way--they earn it. (Sylvia) Right. The rest of us pick it off trees in the backyard.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p.154

Money, Way, Fashion