Quotes about leaf (231 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I am afraid because I can so clearly foresee my own life rotting away of itself, like a leaf that rots without falling, while I pursue my round of existence from day to day.”

Osamu Dazai book The Setting Sun

Source: The Setting Sun

Life

“As withered weed through cruell winters tine,
That feeles the warmth of sunny beames reflection,
Liftes up his head, that did before decline
And gins to spread his leafe before the faire sunshine.”

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene

Canto 12, stanza 34
The Faerie Queene (1589–1596), Book IV

Feeling , Winter

“The use of men is like a leaf
On bough, which goeth and another cometh.”

Dante Alighieri book Paradiso

Canto XXVI, lines 137–138 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Paradiso

Men

“I lift my heart as spring lifts up
A yellow daisy to the rain;
My heart will be a lovely cup
Altho' it holds but pain.

For I shall learn from flower and leaf
That color every drop they hold,
To change the lifeless wine of grief
To living gold.”

Sara Teasdale Rivers to the Sea

"Alchemy"
Rivers to the Sea (1915)

Pain , Spring , Heart , Learning

“Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”

Robert Frost Nothing Gold Can Stay

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" (1923)
1920s

Flowers , Nature

“YOU are the big drop of dew under the lotus leaf,
I am the smaller one on its upper side,'
said the dewdrop to the lake.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

“Summer is the season of motion, winter is the season of form. In summer everything moves save the fixed and inert. Down the hill flows the west wind, making wavelets in the shorter grass and great billows in the standing hay; the tree in full leaf sways its heavy boughs below and tosses its leaves above; the weed by the gate bends and turns when the wind blows down the road. It is the shadow of moving things that we usually see, and the shadows are themselves in motion. The shadow of a branch, speckled through with light, wavers across the lawn, the sprawling shadow of the weed moves and sways across the dust.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

Tree , Light , Grass , Winter

“Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

45
The Gardener http://www.spiritualbee.com/love-poems-by-tagore/ (1915)

Positive , Life , Time , Dance

“For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

Life , Age

“I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books, and stopped to read the start of a sentence that caught my eye.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Books , Reading

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaf and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin’ in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin’ in the poplar trees.”

Billie Holiday (1915–1959) American jazz singer and songwriter

"Strange Fruit" (1939). Though Holiday's renditions made this anti-lynching song famous, it was written by Abel Meeropol (using his pseudonym "Lewis Allen").
Misattributed

Tree

“I never yet touched a fig leaf that didn't turn into a price tag.”

Saul Bellow book Humboldt's Gift

Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 159
General sources

“In infancy I was afraid of the dark, which I peopled with all sorts of things; but my grandfather cured me of that by daring me to walk through certain dark parts of the house when I was 3 or 4 years old. After that, dark places held a certain fascination for me. But it is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now—but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived. At the ages of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8 I have been whirled through formless abysses of infinite night and adumbrated horrors as black & as seethingly sinister as any of our friend Fafhrd's [a nickname Lovecraft used for Fritz Leiber] "splatter-stencil" triumphs. That's why I appreciate such triumphs so keenly, I have seen these things! Many a time I have awaked in shrieks of panic, & have fought desperately to keep from sinking back into sleep & its unutterable horrors. At the age of six my dreams became peopled with a race of lean, faceless, rubbery, winged things to which I applied the home-made name of night-gaunts. Night after night they would appear in exactly the same form—& the terror they brought was beyond any verbal description. Long decades later I embodied them in one of my Fungi from Yuggoth pseudo-sonnets, which you may have read. Well—after I was 8 all these things abated, perhaps because of the scientific habit of mind which I was acquiring (or trying to acquire). I ceased to believe in religion or any other form of the supernatural, & the new logic gradually reached my subconscious imagination. Still, occasional nightmares brought recurrent touches of the ancient fear—& as late as 1919 I had some that I could use in fiction without much change. The Statement of Randolph Carter is a literal dream transcript. Now, in the sere & yellow leaf (I shall be 47 in August), I seem to be rather deserted by stark horror. I have nightmares only 2 or 3 times a year, & of these none even approaches those of my youth in soul-shattering, phobic monstrousness. It is fully a decade & more since I have known fear in its most stupefying & hideous form. And yet, so strong is the impress of the past, I shall never cease to be fascinated by fear as a subject for aesthetic treatment. Along with the element of cosmic mystery & outsideness, it will always interest me more than anything else. It is, in a way, amusing that one of my chief interests should be an emotion whose poignant extremes I have never known in waking life!”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Harry O. Fischer (late February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 416-417
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life , People , Youth , Age

“There was one picture in particular which bothered him. It had begun with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic roots.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien book Leaf by Niggle

Leaf by Niggle (1945)

Tree

“The wise man warns me that life is but a dewdrop on the lotus leaf.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

46
The Gardener http://www.spiritualbee.com/love-poems-by-tagore/ (1915)

Life

“Ah, with the Grape my fading Life provide,
And wash the Body whence the Life has died,
And lay me, shrouded in the living Leaf,
By some not unfrequented Garden-side.”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

The Rubaiyat (1120)

Life

“Art is the Flower - Life is the Green Leaf. Let every artist strive to make his flower a beautiful living thing, something that will convince the world that there may be, there are, things more precious more beautiful - more lasting than life itself… you must offer real, living - beautifully coloured flowers - flowers that grow from, but above, the green leaf – flowers that are not dead – are not dying – not artificial – real flowers springing from your own soul – not even cut flowers - You must offer the flowers of the art that is in you – the symbols of all that is noble – and beautiful – and inspiring - flowers that will often change a colourless leaf - into an established and thoughtful thing.”

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) Scottish architect, designer, water colourist and artist

Lecture, "Seemliness" (Glasgow, 1902), as cited in: David Brett, C. R. Mackintosh: The Poetics of Workmanship, (2004), p. 56

Life , World , Beauty , Art

“To be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.”

W.B. Yeats book Michael Robartes and the Dancer

St. 7
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), A Prayer For My Daughter http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1421/

Hate , Tear , Evil , Chance

“Seek to understand the root. — It is futile to argue as to which single leaf, which design of branch, or which attractive flower you like; when you understand the root, you understand all its blossoming.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 11

Flowers , Understanding

“"One cave she wolf go too farther, and I wolf leaf her" he said to his fave rave horse. Of course the horse didn't answer, because as you know they cannot speak, least of all to a garlic eating, stinking, little yellow greasy fascist bastard catholic Spaniard. They soon made it up howevans and Jesus and wee Spastic were once morphia unitely in a love that knew no Suzie. The only thing that puzzled Jesus was why his sugarboot got so annoyed when he called her his little Spastic in public.”

John Lennon book A Spaniard in the Works

"A Spaniard In The Works" from A Spaniard In The Works (1965); this has sometimes been misquoted as if Lennon were speaking specifically about Jesus Christ, when in fact, it is part of the odd narration of an odd story with elements of satire, about a Spanish groom named "Jesus El Pifico".

Love , Wolf , Horse

“I'll turn over a new leaf.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book III, Ch. 13.

“A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to help all life which he is able to succor, and when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring anything living. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy as valuable in itself, nor how far it is capable of feeling. To him life as such is sacred. He shatters no ice crystal that sparkles in the sun, tears no leaf from its tree, breaks off no flower, and is careful not to crush any insect as he walks.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics
Context: A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to help all life which he is able to succor, and when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring anything living. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy as valuable in itself, nor how far it is capable of feeling. To him life as such is sacred. He shatters no ice crystal that sparkles in the sun, tears no leaf from its tree, breaks off no flower, and is careful not to crush any insect as he walks. If he works by lamplight on a summer evening, he prefers to keep the window shut and to breathe stifling air, rather than to see insect after insect fall on his table with singed and sinking wings.
If he goes out in to the street after a rainstorm and sees a worm which has strayed there, he reflects that it will certainly dry up in the sunshine, if it does not quickly regain the damp soil into which it can creep, and so he helps it back from the deadly paving stones into the lush grass. Should he pass by an insect which has fallen into a pool, he spares the time to reach it a leaf or stalk on which it may clamber and save itself.

Life , Way , Feeling , Flowers

“Again, and maybe the last time on this earth, I recall the great vision you sent me. It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds. Hear me, not for myself, but for my people; I am old. Hear me that they may once more go back into the sacred hoop and find the good red road, the shielding tree!”

Black Elk (1863–1950) Oglala Lakota leader

Black Elk Speaks (1961)
Context: To the center of the world you have taken me and showed the goodness and the beauty and the strangeness of the greening earth, the only mother — and there the spirit shapes of things, as they should be, you have shown to me and I have seen. At the center of this sacred hoop, you have said that I should make the tree to bloom.
With tears running, O Great Spirit, Great Spirit, my Grandfather — with running tears I must say now that the tree has never bloomed. A pitiful old man, you see me here, and I have fallen away and have done nothing. Here at the center of the world, where you took me when I was young and taught me; here, old, I stand, and the tree is withered, Grandfather, my Grandfather!
Again, and maybe the last time on this earth, I recall the great vision you sent me. It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds. Hear me, not for myself, but for my people; I am old. Hear me that they may once more go back into the sacred hoop and find the good red road, the shielding tree!

People , Bird , Tree , Singing

“Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world any more. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Tree , Beauty , World

“A leaf carried away with the stream of water, it can crash along the way, or go on to the darkest parts of the unknown ocean.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Water , Way , Parting

“Give me a land of boughs in leaf
A land of trees that stand;
Where trees are fallen there is grief;
I love no leafless land.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

Love , Tree

“Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.”

Borís Pasternak (1890–1960) Russian writer

LIFE magazine (13 June 1960)

Tear , Night

“If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.”

Michael Crichton Timeline

Variant: Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree.
Source: Timeline

History , Tree , Parting

“you will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf
know you could tumble at any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

--The Art of Disappearing”

Naomi Shihab Nye (1952) American writer

Source: Salting the Ocean: 100 Poems by Young Poets

Art , Feeling , Time

“In the fury of the moment I can see the Master's hand
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Shot of Love (1981), Every Grain Of Sand

“Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.”

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

Love , Life , Heart

“When I die, don't come, I wouldn't want a leaf
to turn away from the sun -- it loves it there.
There's nothing so spiritual about being happy
but you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last.”

Frank O'Hara (1926–1966) American poet, art critic and writer

Love , Sun , Happiness

“If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn,
They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

"Sisters of Mercy"
Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)
Context: When they lay down beside me I made my confession to them.
They touched both my eyes and I touched the dew on their hem.
If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn,
They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.

Love , Life , Tear , Season

“I seek truth and beauty in the transparency of an autumn leaf, in the perfect form of a seashell on the beach, in the curve of a woman's back, in the texture of an ancient tree trunk, but also in the elusive forms of reality.”

Isabel Allende book Portrait in Sepia

Source: Portrait in Sepia

Truth , Beauty , Autumn , Reality

“Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Eating Animals

Source: Eating Animals

Children , World , Family , Communication

“Tomorrow we will only give them
a leaf of the tree of our love, a leaf
which will fall on the earth
like if it had been made by our lips
like a kiss which falls
from our invincible heights
to show the fire and the tenderness
of a true love.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Love , Kiss , Tree

“Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.”

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

Love , Life , Feeling

“You could be
the leaf that never falls from the tree
you could be
the sun that never leaves the sky
this might be
the happy ending without the ending
this might be
a reason to try”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: How They Met, and Other Stories

Tree , Sun , Happiness

“if you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia. it's a distortion of nature, it goes against God's laws, for in all the world's woods and forests he did not create a single leaf the same as another.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Veronika Decides to Die

God , World , Law , Nature

“But what I really want is to just swim around in a warm baby pool of these friends, jump in their dry leaf pile-to rub them all over myself, without words and clothes.”

Dave Eggers (1970) memoirist, novelist, short story writer, editor, publisher

Baby , Clothes

“If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?”

Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) Polish science fiction author

“Thank you leaf blowers, for making me look like the world's lamest Ghostbuster. I ain't afraid of no leaves.”

Jimmy Fallon (1974) American TV Personality

Source: Thank You Notes

World

“It is a time of quiet joy, the sunny morning. When the glittery dew is on the mallow weeds, each leaf holds a jewel which is beautiful if not valuable. This is no time for hurry or for bustle. Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning.”

John Steinbeck book Tortilla Flat

Source: Tortilla Flat

Beauty , Time , Joy

“Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Water

“Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree.”

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) English novelist and poet

Beauty , Autumn , Tree

“They will come back, come back again,
As long as the red earth rolls.
He never wasted a leaf or a tree.
Do you think he would squander souls?”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Soul , Thinking , Tree

“Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

C. 2, p. 10.
Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Life , Tree , Suffering

“He has ''. Eddy fumbled for her high school French. 'A heart like an artichoke?' '. He has a leaf for everyone, but makes a meal for no one.”

Poppy Z. Brite (1967) Novelist, short story writer, food writer

School , Heart

“I would have offered you a forest of truth, but you wish to speak of a single leaf”

David Gemmell (1948–2006) British author of heroic fantasy

Source: Fall of Kings

Truth

“I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.”

Cheryl Strayed book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Tree

“The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror.”

Anaïs Nin book House of Incest

Source: House of Incest

Mood

“Leaf! you are so big!
How can you change your
color, then just fall!

As if there were no
such thing as integrity!”

Frank O'Hara book Lunch Poems

Source: Lunch Poems

Color , Change

“remember you must live.
remember you most love.
remainder you mist leaf.”

Ali Smith Hotel World

Hotel World

Love

“Every blade in the field - Every leaf in the forest - lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Life , Season

“Sometimes my fancy gets to floating inside me, threatening to carry me away like a leaf on a wind. Better to be a stone.”

Shannon Hale book Book of a Thousand Days

Source: Book of a Thousand Days

“I am a forgettable leaf on a tree.”

Gregory Maguire book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Tree

“time is a tree (this life one leaf)
but love is the sky and i am for you
just so long and long enough”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Love , Life , Tree , Time

“A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Coffee , Support , Bird , Sun

“A memory, pressed into my heart like a leaf in a book.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: It's Not Summer Without You

Books , Memory , Heart

“[From Ianthe]
I am a miser
Of all thy thoughts and words, and looks and feelings—
Oh, I am jealous of a leaf, a flower,
A song, a star, if much thought on by thee!”

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

The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Feeling , Star , Flowers

“Nay, Spring was o'er-happy and knew not the reason,
And Summer dreamed sadly, for she thought all was ended
In her fulness of wealth that might not be amended;
But this is the harvest and the garnering season,
And the leaf and the blossom in the ripe fruit are blended.”

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

Love is Enough (1872), Song III: It Grew Up Without Heeding

Dreams , Spring , Summer , Wealth

“The United States can't keep a completely open system if the rest of the world is less open. The United States may have to take a leaf out of the book of Japan, China, and Germany, and have protectionism inside the system.”

Robert Mundell (1932) economist

Robert Mundell in: "Nobel Laureate: The U.S. Is The 'Naked Woman' Of The World Economy," at forbes.com, May 26, 2013

Books , World

“As a noun, design is the named (although sometimes unnamable) structure or behavior of a system whose presence resolves or contributes to the resolution of a force or forces on that system. A design thus represents one point in a potential decision space. A design may be singular (representing a leaf decision) or it may be collective (representing a set of other decisions).
As a verb, design is the activity of making such decisions. Given a large set of forces, a relatively malleable set of materials, and a large landscape upon which to play, the resulting decision space may be large and complex. As such, there is a science associated with design (empirical analysis can point us to optimal regions or exact points in this design space) as well as an art (within the degrees of freedom that range beyond an empirical decision; there are opportunities for elegance, beauty, simplicity, novelty, and cleverness).
All architecture is design but not all design is architecture. Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Grady Booch (2006) " On design https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/gradybooch/entry/on_design?lang=en" cited in: Frank Buschmann, ‎Kevlin Henney, ‎Douglas C. Schmidt (2007) Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, On Patterns and Pattern Languages. p. 214

Beauty , Art , Behavior , Optimism

“It is the incongruous thing in my entire life, this isolation.... My work requires it – but I myself have no need or use for it – Perhaps once on a time I found isolation imperative – I think all chrysalises do – all embryos go for the underside of the leaf in the time of body-change preparing for the final reassertion –resurrection – the establishment of the entity. But now I’ve come up tot the outside of my casements.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

Quote from Marsden Hartley Revisited or, Were We Really Ever There, Peter Plagens; Artforum 7, May 1969, p. 41
1931 - 1943

Life , Thinking , Change , Time

“A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth… Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicate to the sayings of Confucius. Such a society functions admirably in the production of cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the end and joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make advertising-pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to sit talking not of love and courage but of the convenience of safety razors.”

Sinclair Lewis book Main Street

Main Street (1920)

Love , Wisdom , Pain , World

“Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

E 65
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)

Lie , Books , Light , Reading

“To regret the exchange of earthly pleasures for the joys of heaven, is as if the grovelling caterpillar should lament that it must one day quit the nibbled leaf to soar aloft and flutter through the air, roving at will from flower to flower, sipping sweet honey from their cups, or basking in their sunny petals.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XLV : Reconciliation; Helen to Gilbert

Pleasure , Flowers , Joy

“The gods are growing old;
The stars are singing Golden hair to gray
Green leaf to yellow leaf,—or chlorophyl
To xanthophyl, to be more scientific.”

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) American poet

Captain Craig (1902)

God , Star , Singing

“Light fills the air, wind is aglow, drink of it, breathe of it, make leafing.
Rainfall sows itself, it grows down through soil to the secret places where stones abide; it brings the strength of them up rootward.
Lie still, molder away, then be again grass.”

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Source: Harvest of Stars (1993), Ch. 55

Lie , Secret , Drink , Light

“Today, after eighteen years of defeat, the book of your domination is again opened, and your first act awakens every unhappy memory, and threatens to destroy the confidence which your professions of patriotism inspired. You turned down a leaf of the history that recorded your last act of power in 1861, and you have now signalized your return to power by beginning a second chapter at the same page, not this time by a heroic act that declares war on the battlefield, but you say, if all the legislative powers of the government do not consent to let you tear certain laws out of the statute-book, you will not shoot our government to death as you tried to do in the first chapter, but you declare that if we do not consent against our will, if you cannot coerce an independent branch of this government, against its will, to allow you to tear from the statute-books some laws put there by “there by the will of the people, you will starve the government to death.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1870s, Speech (1879)

Death , War , People , Books

“Because in the end those kind of conservative tea-leaf-reading focus group driven polling types who I think led Kim into nothingness, he's got his life to repent in leisure now at what they did to him.”

Paul Keating (1944) Australian politician, 24th Prime Minister of Australia

On Kim Beazley's ALP Leadership, Lateline interview, June 7 2007.

Life , Thinking , Reading , Tea

“My tears, O Ryno! are for the dead; my voice for those that have passed away. Tall thou art on the hill; fair among the sons of the vale. But thou shalt fall like Morar; the mourner shall sit on thy tomb. The hills shall know thee no more; thy bow shall lie in thy hall, unstrung!
Thou wert swift, O Morar! as a roe on the desert; terrible as a meteor of fire. Thy wrath was as the storm. Thy sword in battle, as lightning in the field. Thy voice was a stream after rain; like thunder on distant hills. Many fell by thy arm; they were consumed in the flames of thy wrath. But when thou didst return from war, how peaceful was thy brow! Thy face was like the sun after rain; like the moon in the silence of night; calm as the breast of the lake when the loud wind is laid.
Narrow is thy dwelling now! dark the place of thine abode! With three steps I compass thy grave, O thou who wast so great before. Four stones, with their heads of moss, are the only memorial of thee. A tree with scarce a leaf, long grass, which whistles in the wind, mark to the hunter's eye the grave of the mighty Morar.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

"The Songs of Selma"
The Poems of Ossian

War , Lie , Peace , Art

“One only leaf upon the top of a tree - the sole remaining leaf - danced round and round like a rag blown by the wind.”

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

March 7, 1798
This was turned into Coleridge's Christabel, lines 48-50:
There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can.
Diaries

Tree , Dance

“I laugh at it today, now that I have had all the good of it. Let the bridge blow up, provided I have got my troops across… Nonetheless, that book was a terrible risk. A transparent leaf separates it from madness.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

On Ulysses, as quoted in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage (1997) by Robert H. Deming, p. 22

Books , Madness

“There is no sign of leaf or bud,
A hush is over everything —
Silent as women wait for love,
The world is waiting for the spring.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Central Park at Dusk"
Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911)

Love , Women , World , Spring

“Our initial perplexity before nature is explained by our seeing at first the small outer branches and not penetrating to the main branches or the trunk. But once this is realized, one will perceive a repetition of the whole law even in the outermost leaf and turn it to good use.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1904), # 536, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1903 - 1910

Law , Nature

“A cottonwood leaf beetle scuttled out of the loosened earth, frantic legs working the sandy dirt, orange and black body desperate for a new hiding place. The sunset was fading, and a bloated ocher moon pushed its way into the dark blue sky.”

Andrea Lewis (writer) Microsoft employee

“Family Cucurbita” The MacGuffin, Vol. XXVII No. 1 (Fall, 2010)
2010-

Way

“There was no one in the world quite like Plante. I learned more from him in two years with the Leafs than I did in all my other hockey days. He taught me a great deal about playing goal both on the ice and in my head off the ice. He taught me to be aggressive around the goal and take an active part in play instead of waiting for things to happen. He showed me how I kept putting myself off-balance by placing my weight on my left leg instead of on my stick side. He taught me how to steer shots off into the corner instead of letting them rebound in front of me. That old guy made a good goalie out of me.”

Bernie Parent (1945) Canadian ice hockey player

Quoted in Kevin Shea, "One on One with Bernie Parent," http://www.legendsofhockey.net/html/spot_oneononep198403.htm Legends of Hockey.net (2005-11-07)

World , Guy , Learning , Waiting

“Time carries him as the river carries
A leaf in the downstream water.
No matter. The enchanted one insists
And shapes God with delicate geometry.
Since his illness, since his birth,
He goes on constructing God with the word.
The mightiest love was granted him
Love that does not expect to be loved.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Jorge Luis Borges, "Baruch Spinoza", as translated in Spinoza and Other Heretics, Vol. 1: The Marrano of Reason (1989) by Yirmiyahu Yovel
A - F

Love , God , Birth , Water

“I was reading the Book of Job. / People I knew came and went, / I read their book, / the seasons turned away, / I had been reading for a long time. / I was quiet. Not a single leaf to be seen. / I looked up: it had gone dark on me, / that star / in the middle of the sentence: // Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

Mirkka Rekola (1931–2014) Finnish writer

People , Books , Star , Time

“This one is too elegant, too shiny, like jewelry. It seeks applause. This is clear to me, but difficult to explain, which is what makes abstraction so fascinating. In one sense, abstract art is absolutely nothing, stupid. In 100 years, maybe people will just think it's garbage. But somehow we see something in it; we have a sense of quality. [searching for an illustration of his point, Richter leafs through a catalog to find some of his 'gray monochromes']. I was doing these [monochromes] when I was getting divorced. When you feel totally empty, you do this - but then I saw that one picture was actually better than another. Both were miserable, but the difference was interesting. I loved this: that there must be something, some higher faculty, some progressive sensibility that we find in abstraction. But it is impossible to describe.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

Love , People , Stupidity , Art

“What takes place within the structure of the leaf, then, with the aid of the wonderful green workmen, is this: A certain number of molecules of water, brought to the leaf from root and stem, are taken in hand and compounded with a certain number of molecules of carbon extracted from the air that has been brought into the leaf laboratory through its mouths or stomata from the outside atmosphere.
When the compound has been effected, we still have the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen that composed the water molecules and the atoms of carbon, but they are so marvelously put together that they no longer constitute the liquid water or the gas in which the carbon was imported. They now constitute an altogether new substance which is termed sugar.
Thus only three elements are dealt with and these very familiar ones. It would seem as if almost any chemist should be able to manage a simple combination like that. But… no human chemist knows how to manage it. There are forces to be invoked in effecting that combination of which no chemist has any knowledge.
Only the chlorophyll grains in the plant leaf have learned the secret, and up to the present they have kept their secret well.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

How Plants are Trained to Work for Man (1921) Vol. 5 Gardening

Secret , Knowledge , Learning , Water

“Understand me: I wish to be a man from somewhere, a man among men. You see, a slave, when he passes by, weary and surly, carrying a heavy load, limping along and looking down at his feet, only at his feet to avoid falling down; he is in his town, like a leaf in greenery, like a tree in a forest, argos surrounds him, heavy and warm, full of herself; I want to be that slave, Electra, I want to pull the city around me and to roll myself up in it like a blanket. I will not leave.”

Jean Paul Sartre The Flies

Orestes to Electra, Act 2
The Flies (1943)

Men , Understanding , Tree

“The leaf and his body were one. Neither possessed a separate permanent self. Neither could exist independently from the rest of the universe.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Old Path White Clouds : Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha (1991)

Universe

“The leaf that spreads in the sunlight is the only holiness there is. I haven’t found holiness in the faiths of mortals, nor in their music, nor in their dreams: it’s out in the open field, with the green rows looking at the sky. I don’t know what it is, this holiness: but it’s there, and it looks at the sky.”

Kage Baker book In the Garden of Iden

Source: In the Garden of Iden (1997), Chapter 5 (p. 46)

Faith , Dreams , Music

“To paint even a bottle is dramatic. A leaf will do.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

Notebooks

Painting

“The dream on the pillow,
That flits with the day,
The leaf of the willow
A breath wears away;
The dust on the blossom,
The spray on the sea;
Ay,—ask thine own bosom—
Are emblems of thee.”

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

(29th March 1823) Song - The dream on the pillow.
The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Dreams , Sea

“We live in a small world. Not a leaf falls that doesn't affect a myriad of things. When we reach out to someone in love and the effect is made — everyone, everything which comes in contact with the person we've effected is better for it. Of course, the converse is true, too.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

A Magazine of People and Possibilities interview (1998)

Love , World , Personality

“THE quiet of the evening hour
Was laid on every summer leaf;
That purple shade was on each flower,
At once so beautiful, so brief,
Only the aspen knew not rest,
But still, with an unquiet song,
Kept murmuring to the gentle west,
And cast a changeful shade along.”

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

The Aspen Tree from The London Literary Gazette (21st August 1830)
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Beauty , Flowers , Change , Summer

“No matter what we are, and what we sing,
Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel”

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) American poet

Closing couplet- Quatrain 111 Children of the Night 1897 edition kindle ebook ASIN B004UJKLY2

Singing , Time

“In July, my father left to take the waters; he left me with my mother and older brother at the mercy of the summer days, white from the heat and stunning. Stupefied by the light, we leafed through that great book of the holiday, in which the pages were ablaze with splendour, their sickly sweet pulp, deep within, made from golden pears.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“August” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/shops/august1.htm
His father, The seasons

Books , Light , Water , Holiday

“He dreamt that night that he rode through the woods on a low ridge. Below him he could see deer in a meadow where the sun fell on the grass. The grass was still wet and the deer stood in it to their elbows. He could feel the spine of the mule rolling under him and he gripped the mule's barrel with his legs. Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed, he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins slender like bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day ever was and he was riding to his death.”

Cormac McCarthy book Child of God

Source: Child of God (1973), p.162

Love , Death , World , Sadness

“Seething over inwardly
With fierce indignation,
In my bitterness of soul,
Hear my declaration.
I am of one element,
Levity my matter,
Like enough a withered leaf
For the winds to scatter.”
Estuans intrinsecus ira vehementi in amaritudine loquar meę menti: factus de materia levis elementi similes sum folio de quo ludunt venti.

Archpoet (1130–1165) 12th century poet

Estuans intrinsecus
ira vehementi
in amaritudine
loquar meę menti:
factus de materia
levis elementi
similes sum folio
de quo ludunt venti.
Source: "Confession", Line 1

Soul

“The plant laboratories in which this wonderful and vitally essential transformation is effected are chiefly located in the leaf of the plant… the thoughtful person must regard this structure—the most ordinary green leaf of tree or shrub or vine or the tiniest blade of grass—as in some respects the most wonderful thing in the world.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

p, 125
How Plants are Trained to Work for Man (1921) Vol. 5 Gardening

World , Tree , Grass , Personality

“Lead your child by the hand to the great scenes of nature; teach him on the mountain and in the valley. There he will listen better to your teaching; the liberty will give him greater force to surmount difficulties. But in these hours of liberty it should be nature that teaches rather than you. Do not allow yourself to prevail for the pleasure of success in your teaching; or to desire in the least to proceed when nature diverts him; do not take away in the least the pleasure which she offers him. Let him completely realize that it is nature that teaches, and that you, with your art, do nothing more than walk quietly at her side. When he hears a bird warble or an insect hum on a leaf, then cease your talk; the bird and the insect are teaching; your business is then to be silent.”

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) Swiss pedagogue and educational reformer

Diary entry (1774-02-15)

Pleasure , Art , Mountain , Business

“If you find it hard to believe that there was an Intelligent Designer, give this some thought. Man, with all his genius, can’t make a rock, a leaf, a flower, a living singing bird, a croaking frog, or even a grain of dead sand from nothing. We can recreate, but we can’t create anything material from nothing, living or dead. Not a thing. Did you realize that if we could simply make one blade of grass without using existing materials, we could solve the world’s hunger problem? If we could make a blade of grass, we could then create a lot more grass, feed the green material through a machine that does what the common cow does, and have pure white full cream milk, then smooth cream, delicious yogurt, tasty cheese, and smooth butter. But we can’t make even one blade of grass from nothing, let alone giving it the ability to reproduce after its own kind, as regular grass does. We have no idea where to begin when it comes to creating. If that’s true, how intellectually dishonest is it to say that this entire incredible creation in which we live, came into existence with no Intelligent Designer?”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition (2009)

Hunger , World , Intelligence , Flowers

“A little stallion gallops across the leafing fingers-
Black the gate leaps open, I sing;
How did we live here?”

Paul Celan (1920–1970) Romanian poet and translator

"Tallow Lamp" in: Paul Celan (1972) Selected poems. p. 22

Singing

“And so I leave
On cruel winds
Squalling
And gusting me
Like a dead leaf
Falling.”

Paul Verlaine Chanson d'automne

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.
"Chanson d'automne", line 13, from Poèmes saturniens (1866); Sorrell p. 27

Dead

“But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility. Who am I—though I have the power to do it—to punish and reward, playing with men’s destinies?”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 4, "Magelight" (Ged)

Men , World , Intelligence , Nature

“There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel

Part I, l. 48
Christabel (written 1797–1801, published 1816)

Light , Dance