Quotes about trees
page 19

“Whosoever has a natural leaning towards a science, even if it was less noble than another, should not abandon it for the other because if he did he would be like someone who would be growing coconuts in al-Andalus and olive trees in India, crops that would never fructify.”

Ibn Hazm (994–1064) Arab theologian

ibid, 21

Science, Nature

“See, see where Christ's blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world, — dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar's laurel crown. Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain —
"Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee."”

Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) British poet

Still Falls the Rain (1940)

Pain, Light, Heart, Christ

“I have seen a German youth camp, housing six thousand children around the age of ten, display in tree-high letters the words: ‘You were born to die for Germany!’ I have seen babies of six and seven, black-shirted and belted, march in Italy in military drill. I have seen children in Russia kindergartens taught how to adjust gas masks and the strategy of trench warfare.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
p. 34-35

Baby, Housing, Children, Youth

“It is not given me to trace
The lovely laughter of that face,
Like a clear brook most full of light,
Or olives swaying on a height,
So silver they have wings, almost;
Like a great word once known and lost
And meaning all things. Nor her voice
A happy sound where larks rejoice,
Her body, that great loveliness,
The tender fashion of her dress,
I may not paint them.
These I see,
Blazing through all eternity,
A fire-winged sign, a glorious tree!”

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) poet, short story writer, novelist

Source: Young Adventure (1918), The Quality of Courage

Painting, Love, Light, Happiness

“Think of life as being this book, an unfinished book for sure. We're just seeing the last few pages of each chapter. If you look out on the eight million species that we share this planet with, think of them all being four billion years of evolution. They're all the product of that. Think of us all as young leaves on this ancient and gigantic tree of life, all of us connected by invisible branches not just to each other, but to our extinct relatives and our evolutionary ancestors. As a biologist, I'm still trying to learn, with others, how everyone's related to each other, who is related to whom. Perhaps it's better still to think of us as a little fish out of water. Yes, one that learned to walk and talk, but one that still has a lot of learning to do about who we are and where we came from.”

Prosanta Chakrabarty (1978) American ichthyologist

Source: Four billion years of evolution in six minutes https://www.ted.com/talks/prosanta_chakrabarty_four_billion_years_of_evolution_in_six_minutes (April 2018)

Learning, Water, Thinking, Books

“Who will find peace with the lands? The future of humankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things. Who will listen to the trees, the animals and birds, the voices of the places of the land? As the long forgotten peoples of the respective continents rise and begin to reclaim their ancient heritage, they will discover the meaning of the lands of their ancestors. That is when the invaders of the North American continent will finally discover that for this land, God is red.”

Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005) American writer

pg. ix
God Is Red (1973)

God, Peace, Waiting, Understanding

“The beauty of the forests of Indiana in the rich and lovely month of May surpasses all description. The rivers, swollen by the rains, flow through long lanes of verdure, caressing the islands they seem to carry with them in their course and which look like floating nosegays. The trees raise their straight trunks to the height of more than a hundred and twenty feet and are crowned with tops of admirable beauty. The magnolia, the dog-wood, the catalpa, covered with white flowers, the permed snow of the springtime, intermingle with the delicate green of the other trees.”

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

Third Journal of Travel (1844-1845)

Beauty, Dogs, Flowers, Love

“It is the purity of a truth of which you have had only a glimpse. This is the feast, and the tiny tidbits you tasted before, back there, had made you hope for the existence of the Whole. The nameless emotion, longing, nostalgia, sense of destiny that you felt back there when you stared at the cloud layered sunset in Hawaii, when you stood quietly among the tall, waving trees in the silent forest, when a musical selection, passage, or song recalled memories of the past or brought forth a longing for which there was no associated memory, when you longed for the place where you belonged, whether city, town, country, nation, or family—these are now fulfilled. You are Home. You are where you belong. Where you always should have been.”

Robert Monroe (1915–1995) American founder of The Monroe Institute

Journeys Out of the Body (1971), Chapter 8. Because the Bible Tells Me So

Home, Nostalgia, Family, Country

“South of Oklahoma, east of New Mexico,
West of Louisiana, where all them Cajuns go
We gotta a little place called Texas
Where the women grow on trees
There right there for the pickin'
Just as easy as a man could please You'd better run take hold
You're gonna get young 'fore ya get old
Them Texas women is Texas gold
Kisses that are sweeter than cactus”

Willis Allan Ramsey (1951) American singer-songwriter

Northeast Texas Women

Kiss, Women

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”

John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn

Stanza 2
Poems (1820), Ode on a Grecian Urn

Kiss, Youth, Lovers, Love

“For it may be very plausibly urged on their behalf, that it is impossible to extinguish evil until the origin thereof has been discovered and destroyed. This great river of human Time (rivers were expressly created to feed metaphors, allegories, and navigable canals) which comes flowing down thick with filth and blood from the immemorial past surely cannot be thoroughly cleansed by any purifying process applied to it here in the present for the pollution, if not in its very source (supposing it has a source), or deriving from unimaginable remotenesses of eternity indefinitely beyond its source, at any rate interfused with it countless ages back, and is perennial as the river itself. This immense poison-tree of Life, with its leaves of illusion, blossoms of delirium, apples of destruction, surely cannot be made wholesome and sweet by anything we may do to the branchlets and twigs on which, poor insects, we find ourselves crawling, or to the leaves and fruit on which we must fain feed; for the venom is drawn up in the sap by the taproots plunged in abysmal depths of the past. This toppling and sinking house wherein we dwell cannot be firmly re-established, save by re-establishing from its lowest foundation upwards.”

James Thomson (B.V.) (1834–1882) Scottish writer (1834-1882)

"The Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery", part VIII, pp. 93–94
Essays and Phantasies (1881)

Time, Housing, Past, Age

“You can find it on almost any tree. As we made our way through the forest, it was literally raining rubber juice. Our clothes were full of it. The Congo has so many tributaries that a well-organized company can easily extract a few tons of rubber per year here. You only have to sail up such a river and the branches with rubber hang almost up to your ship.”

Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) Welsh journalist and explorer

Leopold II, Het hele Verhaal, Johan Op De Beeck Horizon, 2020 https://klara.be/leopold-ii-aflevering-8-0 ISBN 9789463962094 Stanley Points out to King Leopold II Of Belgium that the Congo free State which was a loss-making endeavor at that time that rubber extraction has a possibility to make the colony profitable.

Way, Clothes, Relation ships

“A ripe apple never toppled the tree.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)

“The trees get wheeled away”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

Noise Floor (Rarities: 1998-2005) (2006)

“Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement: a sanded floor and whitewashed walls, and the green trees, and flowery meads, and living waters outside; or a grimy palace amid the smoke with a regiment of housemaids always working to smear the dirt together so that it may be unnoticed; which, think you, is the most refined, the most fit for a gentleman of those two dwellings?
So I say, if you cannot learn to love real art; at least learn to hate sham art and reject it. It is not because the wretched thing is so ugly and silly and useless that I ask you to cast it from you; it is much more because these are but the outward symbols of the poison that lies within them; look through them and see all that has gone to their fashioning, and you will see how vain labour, and sorrow, and disgrace have been their companions from the first — and all this for trifles that no man really needs!”

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

Speech, London (10 March 1880)

Hate, Love, Learning, Art

“Man is like a tree, with the mighty trunk of intellect, the spreading branches of imagination, and the roots of the lower instincts that bind him to the earth. The moral life, however, is the fruit he bears; in it his true nature is revealed.
It is the prerogative of man that he need not blindly follow the law of his natural being, but is himself the author of a higher moral law, and creates it even in acting it out.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Section 6 : Higher Life
Life and Destiny (1913)

Imagination, Law, Life, Nature

“Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Knowledge, Life, Hurtful

“Nothing in this world is useless in the eyes of God. Not a leaf from a tree falls, not a hair from your head, not even an insect dies because it was of no use. Everything has a reason to exist.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Manuscript Found in Accra (2012), Uselessness

God, World

“During my childhood, the inscription «tourist» accompanied the picture, where a person in sneakers with a backpack climbs the mountains. Now under a similar comment — a beachgoers: sunglasses, a sun lounger under a palm tree near the azure waters of the ocean. Everything flows, everything changes.”

Viktor Pinchuk (1969)

Quotes from books, Third african traveling (Russian: Третья афровылазка)

Childhood, Mountain, Personality, Water

“I have been filming a lot away from home this year. So the minute I finish, I will dash home to be with my family and be surrounded by Christmas trees and Christmas cheer.”

Michelle Yeoh (1962) Malaysian-born actress of Chinese ethnicity

"Under No Circumstances Will Michelle Yeoh Be Serving a Christmas Turkey" in Vogue (19 November 2019) https://www.vogue.com/article/michelle-yeoh-interview-last-christmas

Family, Home, Christmas

“One of the biggest lie is the perception that a back cloth is a satanic fabric. Wake up my black brothers and sisters. It's just an invention made by a genius black man from a mutuba tree -Edy kasawuli”

Edykasawuli7

Lie, Clothes, Sister

“I scribble on oak trees
Pretty please you can sing
my syllables credible
My cordon bleu sonnets
you just wishing they edible”

Example (musician) (1982) English rapper and singer

"So Many Roads" (song) ("So Many Roads" - video on YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IbYJoWrOIg (+ Lyrics version of "So Many Roads" on YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBUt6gyNgQI Studio albums, What We Made (2007)

Singing

“All of us came from the same source, same tree, and the same Creator.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Adam and Eve were still ignorant and new residents of Heaven, yet the tree was placed there to test their IQ level.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Anytime you start to imagine being the son or daughter of God, then now is a good time to go back to your family tree. Also check your chronological age.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

God, Imagination, Daughters, Age

“Einstein was just a genius of theoretical physics. If you introduced him to biology or chemistry, he would look like a fish trying to climb a tree.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Fish

“The snake that can't peel off its skin can't grow. The soul is trapped inside the body; just like a tree inside a seed.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Soul

“And if my friends refused to listen to me, then the walls had to hear me or the stones in the fields and the trees of the forests.”

Julius Bahnsen (1830–1881) German philosopher

Quoted by Harry Slochower in "Julius Bahnsen, Philosopher of Heroic Despair, 1830-1881" (1932), The Philosophical Review, 41(4), p. 371

“Heart of my heart, we cannot die!
Love triumphant in flower and tree,
Every life that laughs at the sky
Tells us nothing can cease to be:
One, we are one with the song to-day,
One with the clover that scents the world,
One with the Unknown, far away,
One with the stars, when earth grows old.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Unity, § II
The Golden Hynde and Other Poems (1914)

Star, Flowers, World, Heart

“The most beautiful gift of nature is a pleasant morning whenever I see this beautiful sight of nature I fall in love with nature. A pleasant morning brings with it different colors of nature. Just like the green trees and plants that make my eyes feel relaxed, the blue color of the sky signifies ambition, the yellow color of the sun lights the lamp of hope in me, the red and pink colors of flowers fill me with love, these I am surprised to see all the colours. The scent of the wet soil in the morning along with the cool breeze fills me with freshness. When i hear the sweet chirping of birds, my heart starts humming.”

Shabdon Ka Jahan

Flowers, Nature, Bird, Love

“O autumn winds that bake and burn
And all the world to darkness turn,
Now storm and seize and make of me…
A swarm of leaves from Autumn’s Tree!”

Ray Bradbury book The Halloween Tree

Source: The Halloween Tree (1972), Chapter 11 (p. 79)

Autumn, World

“It’s big, it’s broad…
It’s broad, it’s bright…
It fills the sky of All Hallow’s Night…
The strangest sight you’ve ever seen.
The Monster Tree on Halloween.”

Ray Bradbury book The Halloween Tree

Source: The Halloween Tree (1972), Chapter 5 (pp. 28-29)

Night

“I very much lament for what has happened to the groves in Madhura. The coconut trees have all been cut and in their place are to be seen rows of iron spikes with human skulls dangling at the points.”

Gangadevi Indian princess and Sanskrit poetess

Source: Gangadevi. On the condition of Madurai under the Muslim rule. Chattopadhyaya, Brajadulal (2006), Studying Early India: Archaeology, Texts and Historical Issues, Anthem Press, ISBN 978-1-84331-132-4

“The leaves were still on the trees, but were becoming dry, perched like birds ready to fly off.”

Buchi Emecheta (1944–2017) author

Buchi Emecheta, Second Class Citizen - https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/86920.Buchi_Emechet.

Bird, Flying

“Even before I became a certified tree doctor, I had transplanted more than 100 giant trees, mostly between 500 and 1,000 years old, and I can say that I never had one failure.”

Konami Tsukamoto (1949) Japanese tree doctor

Source: Nippon.com Profile/Article by Julian Ryall - Woman Arborist Heals Trees, Parks, Souls https://www.nippon.com/en/people/e00096/ - 9 May 2016 - Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20211107072427/https://www.nippon.com/en/people/e00096/

Failure

“In difficult transplanting operations, I talk to the tree with humility while doing my best to find the right solution. Then, the tree teaches me how to overcome the obstacle.”

Konami Tsukamoto (1949) Japanese tree doctor

Source: The Goi Peace Foundation Lecture Series - Lecture 18: Learning from trees - Lecture Series: Values for the 21st Century https://www.goipeace.or.jp/en/work/lecture/ - 4 Mar 2008 - Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20211107060323/https://www.goipeace.or.jp/en/work/lecture/

“Whenever one tree is cut, two trees should be planted in return.”

Mirza Masroor Ahmad (1950) spiritual leader of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community

Virtual Meetings Source: Virtual Meeting with Waqf-e-Nau From Indonesia https://www.alislam.org/press-release/members-of-waqf-e-nau-from-indonesia-have-honour-of-virtual-meeting-with-head-of-ahmadiyya-muslim-community/, 23rd January 2021

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but desire fulfilled is a tree of life.”

book Bible

Source: Proverbs 13:12

Hope, Heart, Life

“He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.””

Robert Frost Mending Wall

Source: 1910s, Mending Wall (1914)

“Somebody told me once money does not grow on trees.
Well, if that's true, then how do you explain
apples oranges and lemons,
not forgetting melons?”

Gilbert O'Sullivan (1946) Irish singer-songwriter

"The Golden Rule" (song) Gilbert O'Sullivan, "The Golden Rule" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u70QuKjUm64 (song on YouTube) Song lyrics

Money, Forgetting

“"It's not exactly to my best
But it may pass the final test;
And should it break, no man can know
It was my hand that made it so.
The thing is faulty, but perhaps
We'll never hear it when it snaps."
Of course the workman couldn't see
The mangled car beneath the tree,
The dead man, and the tortured wife
Doomed to a cripple's chair for life –
His chief concern was getting by
The stern inspector's eager eye.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

The Broken Wheel, fourth and fifth stanzas.
The Passing Throng (1923)

Dead, Cars, Life

“Seemed like I couldn't stand it any more,
The factory whistles blowin' day by day,
An' men an' children hurryin' by the door,
An' street cars clangin' on their busy way.
The faces of the people seemed to be
Washed pale by tears o' grief an' strife an' care,
Till everywhere I turned to I could see
The same old gloomy pictures of despair.The windows of the shops all looked the same,
Decked out with stuff their owners wished to sell;
When visitors across our doorway came
I could recite the tales they'd have to tell.
All things had lost their old-time power to please;
Dog-tired I was an' irritable, too,
An' so I traded chimney tops for trees,
An' shingled roof for open skies of blue.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Source: When Day is Done (1921), The Cure for Weariness, stanzas 1 and 2

Business, Tear, Men, Children

“You'd never think, to look at
you'd never think to look at
that building there, is where there
used to be trees.
You'd never think it, would you?
You'd never think it, would you?
That building there is where there
used to be trees.
That building there is where there...
That building there is where there..
That building there is where there...
used to be fields.”

Gilbert O'Sullivan (1946) Irish singer-songwriter

"Me (reprise)" (song) Song lyrics Source: Gilbert O'Sullivan, "Me (reprise)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAyN2Q_j1po (song on YouTube)

Thinking

“Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

https://twitter.com/wise_chimp/status/1488946174321205253?s=21

Dead

“Young trees need stakes to support them, but the stakes must be removed once the trees begin to grow, precisely so not to hinder their growth.”

Leopold II of Belgium (1835–1909) King of the Belgians

Source: Leopold II, King of the Belgians in a letter to his minister, Charles Woeste, dated June 9, 1901. https://archive.org/details/TheBelgo-congoleseRoundTable/page/n1/mode/2up

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