Quotes about pine (168 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

St. 18
To a Skylark (1821)
Source: The Complete Poems

Sad , Pain , Laughter

“Nevertheless I long—I pine, all my days—
to travel home and see the dawn of my return.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

V. 219–220 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

Travel , Home

“But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

Solitude

“A pine tree standeth lonely
In the North on an upland bare;
It standeth whitely shrouded
With snow, and sleepeth there.

It dreameth of a Palm tree
Which far in the East alone,
In the mournful silence standeth
On its ridge of burning stone.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

Tree , Silence

“Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely: and pined his loss”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

Love , Loss

“Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.”

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

Muir's marginal note in volume I of Prose Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson (This volume is located at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. See Albert Saijo, "Me, Muir, and Sierra Nevada", in Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California, edited by Peter Berg, San Francisco, California: Planet Drum Foundation, 1978, pages 52-59, at page 55, and Frederick W. Turner, Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours (1985), page 193.)
1870s

Life , Way , Tree

“Christmas can be celebrated in the school room with pine trees, tinsel and reindeers, but there must be no mention of the man whose birthday is being celebrated. One wonders how a teacher would answer if a student asked why it was called Christmas.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Christmas , School , Birthday , Tree

“This quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by,
Between the pines, the tombs, throbs visibly.
Impartial noon patterns the sea in flame —
That sea forever starting and re-starting.
When thought has had its hour, oh how rewarding
Are the long vistas of celestial calm!”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes,
Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes;
Midi le juste y compose de feux
La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée
O récompense après une pensée
Qu'un long regard sur le calme des dieux!
Le Cimetière Marin · Online original and translation as "The Graveyard By The Sea" by C. Day Lewis http://unix.cc.wmich.edu/%7Ecooneys/poems/fr/valery.daylewis.html
Variant translations:
The sea, the ever renewing sea!
Charmes ou poèmes (1922)

Sea

“In winter, when the dismal rain
Comes down in slanting lines,
And Wind, that grand old harper, smote
His thunder-harp of pines.”

Alexander Smith (1829–1867) Scottish poet and essayist

Scene 2.
A Life Drama and other Poems (1853)

Winter

“We respect the past, but we don’t pine for the past. We don’t fear the future; we grab for it.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Bloody Sunday Speech (March 2015)
Context: We respect the past, but we don’t pine for the past. We don’t fear the future; we grab for it. America is not some fragile thing. We are large, in the words of Whitman, containing multitudes. We are boisterous and diverse and full of energy, perpetually young in spirit. That’s why someone like John Lewis at the ripe old age of 25 could lead a mighty march. And that’s what the young people here today and listening all across the country must take away from this day. You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, because you’re ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there’s new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. And it is you, the young and fearless at heart, the most diverse and educated generation in our history, who the nation is waiting to follow.

Fear , Past , Future

“Thou wast that all to me, love,
For which my soul did pine —”

Edgar Allan Poe book To One in Paradise

"To One in Paradise", st. 1 (1834).
Context: Thou wast that all to me, love,
For which my soul did pine —
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine,
All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,
And all the flowers were mine.

Love , Soul

“Here I am in a rabbit run, here I am in a valley of pine, waiting for you to find me. I could pretend I’m speaking to everyone—assume a middle distance and transcend myself—but I’m taking to you and you know it.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

Waiting

“To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Beauty , Peaceful , Grass

“A practical girl never pines; she takes action.”

Adriana Trigiani (1970) American film director

Source: The Shoemaker's Wife

Girl

“Sitting over words
Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
Not far
Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
The echo of everything that has ever
Been spoken
Still spinning its one syllable
Between the earth and silence”

W.S. Merwin (1927–2019) American poet

Silence , Sea , Night

“How right it is to love flowers and the greenery of pines and ivy and hawthorn hedges; they have been with us from the very beginning.”

Vincent Van Gogh book The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Source: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Love , Flowers

“And homeless near a thousand homes I stood,
And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Guilt and Sorrow, st. 41 (1791-1794) Section XLI.
Context: And oft I thought (my fancy was-so strong)
That I, at last, a resting-place had found:
'Here: will I dwell,' said I,' my whole life long,
Roaming the illimitable waters round;
Here will I live, of all but heaven disowned.
And end my days upon the peaceful flood—
To break my dream the vessel reached its bound;
And homeless near a thousand homes I stood,
And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.

Food , Home

“High high in the hills, high in a pine tree bed.
She's tracing the wind with that old hand, counting the clouds with that old chant,
Three geese in a flock
one flew east
one flew west
one flew over the cuckoo's nest”

Ken Kesey book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Tree

“Sometimes he felt like he'd been gone his whole life--in exile, away from the place he was supposed to be, and that, soldier-like, he was pining to be returned. Homesick for a place he'd never been.”

Gillian Flynn book Dark Places

Source: Dark Places

Life

“"You're pining."
"Look who's talking. 'Oh, I love her. Oh, she's my sister. Oh why, why, why--'"”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Jace Herondale and Alec Lightwood, pg. 33
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Heavenly Fire (2014)

Love , Sister

“You will find a way to live without me. You will find a way to live for both of us,' Alexander said to Tatiana as the swelling Kama River flowed from the Ural Mountains through a pine village named Lazarevo, once when they were in love, and young.”

Paullina Simons book The Bronze Horseman

Source: The Bronze Horseman

Love , Way , Mountain

“I could never leave,' Pine Sap said.
'Why?' she asked.
Pine Sap shrugged, and gestured in the direction of the village. 'Because I think people must be the same everywhere. Only these people are my bones.”

Jodi Lynn Anderson American children's writer

Source: Tiger Lily

People , Thinking

“Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe.”

Christopher Moore (1957) American writer of comic fantasy

Source: The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror

Christmas

“I found the candles—atrocious air freshening ones that smelled like fake pine.”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

“No moon, sun, diamond, hands —
fingertip, dot, ray, gauze, sea.
pine green, pink glass, eye,
mine, eraser, mud, mother, I am coming.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

Source: The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait

Sun , Sea

“Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

Source: Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

Wolf

“Many people in the village wanted her to be more of a girl, and Peter had wanted her to be large and brave but a little less large and brave than him. But Pine Sap was sure enough to want her to be exactly who she was.”

Jodi Lynn Anderson American children's writer

Source: Tiger Lily

People , Girl

“You kill me, Rose," he said melodramatically. "Every day is agony without you. Empty. Alone. I pine for you, wondering if you're even still alive.”

Richelle Mead Blood Promise

Source: Blood Promise

“Adrian: Do you smell that?"
Sydney: “I smell the paint, and… wait… is that pine?”
Adrian: “Damn straight. Pine-scented cleaner. As in, I cleaned. With these hands, these hands that don’t do manual labor.”

Richelle Mead Bloodlines

Source: Bloodlines

Waiting , Painting

“Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.”

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

Life , Men , Understanding , Tree

“Colors shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

People , Color

“O Beautiful, for smoggy skies, insecticided grain

for strip-mined mountains' majesty, above the asphalt plain

America, America, man sheds his waste on thee

and hides the pines, with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.”

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

Class Clown (1972)

Beauty , Mountain , Sea

“Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.”

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

pages 271-284 (at pages 282-283)
1890s, The National Parks and Forest Reservations, 1895

People , Way , Mountain , Tree

“Thus I alone, where all my freedom grew,
In prison pine, with bondage and restraint:
And with remembrance of the greater grief,
To banish the less, I find my chief relief.”

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516–1547) English Earl

Source: Prisoned in Windsor, He Recounteth his Pleasure there Passed, Line 51.

Freedom

“When you live on Cold Mountain long enough the autumns pass quickly
When you live alone you have no worries
When you leave the doors open no one bothers you
The bubbling stream runs forever
In the cave a clay pot boils over a fire on the ground
A wandering breeze stirs the fragrant pines
When hungry I eat one simple meal
And lean against the rock in complete harmony”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Mountain , Autumn

“I know a lovely little flower, a flower for which I pine —
I would go gather it, but bars my heavy hours confine;
Oh, grief, when free, how easily that little flower was mine!
...
Oh, were I sinking to the grave I often ask in vain,
And welcome Death stood by to loose the wasted captive's chain —
Ah, name me the Forget-me-not, I'd wake to life again!”

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

The London Literary Gazette (3rd January 1835) Versions from the German (First Series.) - 'The Lovely Little Flower' — Goethe.
Translations, From the German

Love , Life , Death , Flowers

“Burn shavings and splinters of pitch pine, and when they turn to charcoal, put them out, and pound them into mortar with size. This will make a pretty black for fresco painting.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book VII, Chapter X, Sec. 3

Painting

“This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

Prelude.
Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847)

Sadness

“THE Moon is sailing o'er the sky,
But lonely all, as if she pined
For somewhat of companionship,
And felt it was in vain she shined:
Earth is her mirror, and the stars
Are as the court around her throne;
She is a beauty and a queen;
But what is this? she is alone.”

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

The Moon from The London Literary Gazette (25th March 1826)
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Beauty , Star

“Rollers on the beach, wind in the pines, the slow flapping of herons across sand dunes, drown out the hectic rhythms of city and suburb, time tables and schedules. One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today’s tides of all yesterday’s scribblings.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Gift from the Sea (1955)

Time , Sea

“A sensible man takes pleasure in what he has instead of pining for what he has not.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Golden Sayings of Democritus

Pleasure

“I dreamed a place where I have come to dwell
Cold Mountain says it all
Monkeys scream, the valley fog is cold
My door blends with the color of the peaks
I gather leaves and thatch a hut among the pines
Dig a pond and lead a trickle from the brook
Long ago I left the world behind
Eating ferns I pass the years in peace”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

World , Peace , Dreams , Color

“[Concerning the Sugar Pine] The wood is deliciously fragrant, and fine in grain and texture; it is of a rich cream-yellow, as if formed of condensed sunbeams.”

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

Source: 1890s, The Mountains of California (1894), chapter 8: The Forests

“I ran home [from Cloud's Rest to Yosemite Valley] in the moonlight, with long, firm strides; for the sun-love made me strong. Down through the junipers — down through the firs; now in jet-shadows, now in white light; over sandy moraines and bare, clanking rock; past the huge ghost of South Dome, rising weird through the firs — past glorious Nevada — past the groves of Illilouette — through the pines of the valley; frost-crystals flashing all the sky beneath, as star-crystals on all the sky above. All of this mountain-bread for one day!”

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

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr (December 1872); published as " A Geologist's Winter Walk http://books.google.com/books?id=OAEbAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA355", Overland Monthly, volume 10, number 4 (April 1873) pages 355-358 (at page 358); modified slightly and reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 2
1870s

Love , Home , Mountain , Star

““Are you still afraid?” I asked her.
“No,” she said, “I am thankful. The world has been threatened too long by the extraordinary, the supernatural and the monstrous. I shall be happy enough to smell the pines and hear the song of the thrush. And to be with you, Captain von Bek.”
“The world is still threatened,” I said to her, “but perhaps not by Lucifer. I held her hand tightly.”

Michael Moorcock book The War Hound and the World's Pain

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 18 (p. 166)

World , Happiness

“When the early morning sun
first pierced the grayness in the sky,
a pickerel rose from his watery home
to climb a pine tree, singing.
And high in the branches, he looked upon
the morning's glowing beauty -
the wind-blown ripples on the lake,
dew-freshened flowers and fields below.”

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

Aaro Hellaakoski. "The song of the pike hauen laulu." Aina Swan Cutler (trans.) in: Aili Jarvenpa, ‎Michael G. Karni (1989), Sampo, the magic mill: a collection of Finnish-American writing.

Beauty , Home , Flowers , Tree

“Things That Lose by Being Painted
Pinks, cherry blossoms, yellow roses. Men or women who are praised in romances as being beautiful.Things That Gain by Being Painted
Pines. Autumn fields. Mountain villages and paths. Cranes and deer. A very cold winter scene; an unspeakably hot summer scene.”

Sei Shonagon (966–1025) Japanese author and a court lady

Source: The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon (1002), p. 138

Women , Men , Mountain , Autumn

“And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder.”

H. G. Wells book The War of the Worlds

Book I, Ch. 10: In the Storm
The War of the Worlds (1898)

Tree , Housing

“In Swami Dayananda's view, the term Arya was not coterminous with the term Hindu. The classical meaning of the word Arya is 'noble'. It is used as an honorific term of address, used in addressing the honoured ones in ancient Indian parlance. The term Hindu is reluctantly accepted as a descriptive term for the contemporary Hindu society and all its varied beliefs and practices, while the term Arya is normative and designates Hinduism as it ought to be…. Elsewhere in Hindu society, 'Arya' was and is considered a synonym for 'Hindu', except that it may be broader, viz. by unambiguously including Buddhism and Jainism. Thus, the Constitution of the 'independent, indivisible and sovereign monarchical Hindu kingdom' (Art.3:1) of Nepal take care to include the Buddhist minority by ordaining the king to uphold 'Aryan culture and Hindu religion' (Art.20: 1)…. The Arya Samaj's misgivings about the term Hindu already arose in tempore non suspecto, long before it became a dirty Word under Jawaharlal Nehru and a cause of legal disadvantage under the 1950 Constitution. Swami Dayananda Saraswati rightly objected that the term had been given by foreigners (who, moreover, gave all kinds of derogatory meanings to it) and considered that dependence on an exonym is a bit sub-standard for a highly literate and self-expressive civilization. This argument retains a certain validity: the self-identification of Hindus as 'Hindu' can never be more than a second-best option. On the other hand, it is the most practical choice in the short run, and most Hindus don't seem to pine for an alternative.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Who is a Hindu, (2001)

Religion , Art , Dependency

“Do any thing but love; or if thou lovest
And art a Woman, hide thy love from him
Who thou dost worship; never let him know
How dear he is; flit like a bird before him, —
Lead him from tree to tree, from flower to flower;
But be not won, or thou wilt, like that bird,
When caught and caged, be left to pine neglected,
And perish in forgetfulness.”

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

(26th April 1823) Fragment - Do any thing but love ; or if thou lovest
The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Love , Art , Flowers , Bird

“The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Ch. 2, p. 66

Past , Future

“The Sioux had been forced to submit to a series of land grabs and to indignities that are almost unbelievable when read about today. …they were being systematically starved into submission—by the White Bureaucracy—on the little that was left of their reservation in South Dakota. …From Rosebud, the Ghost Dance spread like prairie fire to the Pine Ridge Sioux and finally to Sitting Bull's people at Standing Rock. The Sioux rebelled; the result was the death of Sitting Bull and the massacre of the Indians (despite their ghost shirts) at Wounded Knee in 1890.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Death , People , Reading , Dance

“Heavenly wonderfully beautiful that Wolfhezerland with its stream and pines.. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)”

Anton Mauve (1838–1888) Dutch painter (1838–1888)

(version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Anton Mauve, in het Nederlands:) Goddelijk heerlijk schoon dat met zijne beekje en dennen..
In a letter to Willem Maris, 1863; as cited in: 'Zó Hollands - Het Hollandse landschap in de Nederlandse kunst sinds 1850', Antoon Erftemeijer https://www.franshalsmuseum.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/zohollands_eindversie_def_1.pdf; Frans Hals museum | De Hallen, Haarlem 2011, p. 31
1860's
Variant: All my canvases I paint after sketches. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)

Beauty

“That man’s best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature’s infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

1840s, Letters from New York (1843)
Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/67/12267.html,vol. 1, letter 38

Truth , Nature , Bird , Singing

“Only after Winter comes do we know that the pine and the cypress are the last to fade.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Analects, Other chapters

Winter

“Bird of time –
in Kyoto, pining
for Kyoto.”

Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694) Japanese poet

Basho, On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, London, 1985, p. 43 (Translation: Lucien Stryk)
Even in Kyōto—
hearing the cuckoo's cry—
I long for Kyōto
Classical Japanese Database, Translation #55 http://carlsensei.com/classical/index.php/translation/view/55 (Translation: Robert Hass)
Individual poems

Bird , Time

“Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flower
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?
'God!' let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, 'God!'
'God! ' sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice!
Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!
And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, 'God!'.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni" (1802)

God , Soul , Flowers , Singing

“If you're looking for a place to rest
Cold Mountain is good for a long stay
The breeze blowing through the dark pines
Sounds better the closer you come
And under the trees a white haired man
Mumbles over his Taoist texts
Ten years now he hasn't gone home
He's even forgotten the road he came by”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T'ang Poet Han-shan

Home , Mountain , Tree

“But there are motifs that would need three or four months' work, which could be done, as the vegetation doesn't change here. There are the olive trees and the pines that always keep their leaves. The sun is so fierce that objects seem to be silhouetted, not only in black or white, but in blue, red, brown, violet. I may be wrong, but this seems to be the very opposite of 'modeling'. How happy the gentle landscapists of Auvers would be here, and that [con, or 'bastard'? ] Guillemet.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote from Cezanne's letter to Camille Pissarro, from L'Estaque 2 July 1876, taken from Alex Danchev, The Letters of Paul Cézanne, 2013; as quoted in the 'Daily Beast' online, 13 Oct. 2013 https://www.thedailybeast.com/cezannes-letter-to-pissarro-picture-business-isnt-going-well
'The very opposite of 'modeling' meant roughly that Cézanne and Pissarro in their common painting-years in open air would lay down one plane or patch of color next to another in the painting, without any 'modeling' or shading between them - so that it looked as if each component part of the painting could be picked up from the canvas a little like a 'playing card from the table', as Cezanne explains here.
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, 1860s - 1870s

Tree , Change , Sun , Happiness

“God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!”

Rudyard Kipling Recessional

Stanza 1.
Departmental Ditties and other Verses (1886), Recessional

God , Forgetting

“Pesotsky had an immense house with columns and lions, off which the stucco was peeling, and with a footman in swallow-tails at the entrance. The old park, laid out in the English style, gloomy and severe, stretched for almost three-quarters of a mile to the river, and there ended in a steep, precipitous clay bank, where pines grew with bare roots that looked like shaggy paws; the water shone below with an unfriendly gleam, and the peewits flew up with a plaintive cry, and there one always felt that one must sit down and write a ballad.”

Anton Chekhov book The Black Monk

The Black Monk (1894)

Water , Housing , Cry

“The sand as white
as old bones, the pine trees
strangely red where the sun comes down.
I cannot say if it is our love,
or the day, that is ending.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Departures (1964), translated by Michael Cuanach http://web.archive.org/20041217155724/members.tripod.com/~Cuanach/anna.html

Love , Tree , Sun

“That day the youth was told the tale,
How she had pined beneath the veil
And died, and then they show'd her grave—
He knew that cypress's green wave. —
That night, alone, he watched his bride —
The next they laid him by her side.”

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

(18th September 1824) The Phantom Bride
The London Literary Gazette, 1824

Youth , Night

“To love, to be beloved again, and know
A gulf between us:—aye, 'tis misery!
This agony of passion, this wild faith,
Whose constancy is fruitless, yet is kept
Inviolate:—to feel that all life's hope,
And light, and treasure, clings to one from whom
Our wayward doom divides us. Better far
To weep o'er treachery or broken vows,—
For time may teach their worthlessness:—or pine
With unrequited love;—there is a pride
In the fond sacrifice—the cheek may lose
Its summer crimson; but at least the rose
Has withered secretly—at least, the heart
That has been victim to its tenderness,
Has sighed unechoed by some one as true,
As wretched as itself.”

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

The Lover’s Rock from The London Literary Gazette (5th October 1822) Poetical Sketches. 3rd series - Sketch the Fifth
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Love , Life , Faith , Hope

“When I reached the [Yosemite] valley, all the rocks seemed talkative, and more lovable than ever. They are dear friends, and have warm blood gushing through their granite flesh; and I love them with a love intensified by long and close companionship. … I … bathed in the bright river, sauntered over the meadows, conversed with the domes, and played with the pines.”

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

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr (December 1872); published as " A Geologist's Winter Walk http://books.google.com/books?id=OAEbAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA355", Overland Monthly, volume 10, number 4 (April 1873) pages 355-358 (at page 355); modified slightly and reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 2
1870s

Love

“In modern times, the immortal longings of the mystics are expressed in a cult of incessant activity. Infinite progress... infinite tedium. What could be more dreary than the perfection of mankind? The idea of progress is only the longing for immortality given a techno-futurist twist. Sanity is not found here, nor in the moth-eaten eternities of the mystics. Other animals do not pine for a deathless life. They are already in it. Even a caged tiger passes its life half out of time. Humans cannot enter that never-ending moment. They can find a respite from time when - like Odysseus, who refused Calypso's offer of everlasting life on an enchanted island so he could return to his beloved home - they no longer dream of immortality.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

As It Is: Turning Back (p. 198)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Life , Dreams , Home , Idea

“On a fair morning the mountain invited you to get down and roll in its new grass and flowers (your less inhibited horse did just this if you failed to keep a tight rein). Every living thing sang, chirped, and burgeoned. Massive pines and firs, storm-tossed these many months, soaked up the sun in towering dignity. Tassel-eared squirrels, poker-faced but exuding emotion with voice and tail, told you insistently what your already knew full well: that never had there been so rare a day, or so rich a solitude to spend it in.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“Arizona and New Mexico: On Top”, p. 125.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Arizona and New Mexico: On Top," & "Arizona and New Mexico: Thinking Like a Mountain"

Mountain , Flowers , Solitude , Grass

“Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.”

Chief Seattle (1786–1866) Duwamish chief

Misattributed

People , Memory , Parting

“Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree—and there will be one.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“December: Pines above the Snow”, p. 81.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "November: Axe-in-Hand," "November: A Mighty Fortress," and "December: Pines above the Snow"

God , Tree

“Some have too much, yet still do crave;
I little have, and seek no more:
They are but poor, though much they have,
And I am rich with little store:
They poor, I rich; they beg, I give;
They lack, I have; they pine, I live.”

Edward Dyer (1543–1607) courtier

MS. Rawl 85 (1588), p. 17.

“To this old song:
Partridge lost his quill,
there's no harm won't befall him.

Partridge, whose winged fancy
aspired to a high estate,
lost a feather in his flight
and won the pen of despondency.
He finds in the breeze no buoyancy
for his pennants to haul him:
there's no harm won't befall him.

He wished to soar to a high tower
but found his plumage clipped,
and, observing himself plucked,
pines away in despair.
If he cries out for succor,
stoke the fire to forestall him:
there's no harm won't befall him.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Perdigão perdeu a pena
Não há mal que lhe não venha.Perdigão que o pensamento
Subiu a um alto lugar,
Perde a pena do voar,
Ganha a pena do tormento.
Não tem no ar nem no vento
Asas com que se sustenha:
Não há mal que lhe não venha.Quis voar a üa alta torre,
Mas achou-se desasado;
E, vendo-se depenado,
De puro penado morre.
Se a queixumes se socorre,
Lança no fogo mais lenha:
Não há mal que lhe não venha.
"Perdigão que o pensamento", tr. Landeg White in The Collected Lyric Poems of Luis de Camoes (2016), p. 251
Listen to the poem in Portuguese https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P4_2W-ZwV8&feature=youtu.be&t=10m31s
Lyric poetry, Songs (redondilhas)

Despair

“There grew her father's cypress tree,
No other monument had he.
He bade that never funeral stone
Should tell of glory overthrown,—
What could it say, but foreign sky
Had seen the exile pine and die?”

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

The Golden Violet - The Wreath
The Golden Violet (1827)

Tree

“Climb the steep Cold Mountain way
Roads to Cold Mountain are many and never ending
The valleys are long and deep, the peaks piled high
The streams are wide, the grass is thick
The moss is slippery though there is no rain
The pines sigh though there is no wind
Who can escape the snares of the world
And come to sit with me among the white clouds?”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

World , Way , Mountain , Grass

“A grasshopper shrilled in a tuft at her feet and was answered by other shrillings among the gorse bushes; a solitary rook flapped heavily overhead, and a pair of goldfinches twittered among the thistle-down; there was no other sound except the scarcely perceptible never-ceasing sighing of the wind in the pines and its rustling of acres of heath-bells.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

Last chapter
Heatherly

“Worpswede, I cannot get you out of my mind. There was such atmosphere there – right down to the tips of your toes. Your magnificent pine trees! I call them my men – thick, gnarled, powerful, and tall – and yet with the most delicate nerves and fibers in them. That is my image of the ideal artist. And your birch trees – delicate, slender young virgins who delight the eyes. With that relaxed and dreamy face, as if life had not really begun for them… But then there are some already masculine and bold, with strong and straight trunks. Those are my 'Modern women'. And you willows, with your knotty trunks… You are my old men with silver beards. I have company enough, indeed I do, and it's my own private company. We understand each other well and nod friendly answers back and forth. Life, life, life!”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

a quote of her Journal, Worpswede 1897; as cited in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 192
1897

Life , Women , Men , Understanding

“I'm not pining for nostalgia back in the '50s and '60s, that isn't it. But that sensibility about how we were grounded here is so important. For instance, another American that was born in Waterloo was John Wayne. We were a very patriotic "yay rah rah America" city and nation and I think that's what America's looking for again.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

NBC News interview, quoted in * Wrong John Wayne: Mix-up is opening day headache for Bachmann
2011-06-27
First Read
NBC News
Carrie
Dann
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/27/6958622-wrong-john-wayne-mix-up-is-opening-day-headache-for-bachmann-
2011-06-27
Mixing up actor John Wayne with serial killer John Wayne Gacy
2010s, 2012 Presidential campaign

Thinking , Nostalgia

“Worpswede, Worpswede, Worpswede! [small rural village in North-Germany were a colony of German artists was working then, including Paula] My sunken Bell mood! Birches, birches, pine trees and old willows. Beautiful brown moors – exquisite brown! The canals with their black reflections, black as asphalt..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

Quote from her Journal, Worpswede 1897; as cited in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 192
1897

Beauty , Mood , Tree

“A few human generations ago, grasslands were abundant across much of the South; today there are rare. Driving through the region today, one mostly sees agricultural fields, pine plantations, dense and mostly young hardwood forests and swamps, and, increasingly, urban sprawl.”

Reed Noss (1952)

p. 6 https://books.google.com/books/about/Forgotten_Grasslands_of_the_South.html?id=9ZOaZZbukBwC&pg=PA6
Forgotten Grasslands of the South: Natural History and Conservation (2012)

“A life on the ocean wave!
A home on the rolling deep,
Where the scattered waters rave,
And the winds their revels keep!
Like an eagle caged I pine
On this dull unchanging shore:
Oh give me the flashing brine,
The spray and the tempest's roar!”

Epes Sargent A Life on the Ocean Wave

A Life on the Ocean Wave, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Life , Home , Water

“As I go musing through this mournful land
Soothed by the pine-tree's solemn harmony,
Thy well-loved image comes and walks by me.
I seem to hold thee by the gentle hand
And talk of things I dimly understand,
That thy dear spirit set to mine may be
As to an intricate lock the simple key.”

John Barlas (1860–1914) British writer

XXXII. "As I go musing through this mournful land"
Love Sonnets http://www.sonnets.org/love-sonnets.htm (1889)

Love , Understanding , Tree

“Recently I was visited by a very good friend who had just returned from a long walk in the woods, and I asked her what she had observed. “Nothing in particular,” she replied. I might have been incredulous had I not been accustomed to such responses, for long ago I became convinced that the seeing see little.
How was it possible, I asked myself, to walk for an hour through the woods and see nothing worthy of note? I who cannot see find hundreds of things to interest me through mere touch. I feel the delicate symmetry of a leaf. I pass my hands lovingly about the smooth skin of a silver birch, or the rough, shaggy bark of a pine. In spring I touch the branches of trees hopefully in search of a bud, the first sign of awakening Nature after her winter’s sleep. I feel the delightful, velvety texture of a flower, and discover its remarkable convolutions; and something of the miracle of Nature is revealed to me.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Three Days to See (1933)

Feeling , Search , Spring , Flowers

“Meanwhile Medea, though she was singing and dancing with her maids, could think of one thing only. There was no melody, however gay, that did not quickly cease to please. Time and again she faltered and came to a halt. To keep her eyes fixed on her choir was more than she could do. She was for ever turning them aside to search the distant paths, and more than once she well-nigh fainted when she mistook the noise of the wind for the footfall of a passer-by. But it was not so very long before the sight of Jason rewarded her impatient watch. Like Sirius rising from Ocean, brilliant and beautiful but full of menace for the flocks, he sprang into view, splendid to look at but fraught with trouble for the lovesick girl. Her heart stood still, a mist descended on her eyes, and a warm flush spread across her cheeks. She could neither move towards him nor retreat; her feet were rooted to the ground. And now her servants disappeared, and the pair of them stood face to face without a word or sound, like oaks or tall pines that stand in the mountains side by side in silence when the air is still, but when the wind has stirred them chatter without end. So these two, stirred by the breath of Love, were soon to pour out all their tale.”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book III. Jason and Medea, Lines 948–972

Love , Beauty , Search , Girl

“The leaves of these [larch] trees are like those of the pine; timber from them comes in long lengths, is as easily wrought in joiner's work as is the clearwood of fir, and contains a liquid resin, of the color of Attic honey, which is good for consumptives.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter IX, Sec. 17

Color , Tree

“Full little knowest thou that hast not tride,
What hell it is in suing long to bide:
To loose good dayes, that might be better spent;
To wast long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow.
.........
To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares;
To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires; 13
To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne.
Unhappie wight, borne to desastrous end,
That doth his life in so long tendance spend!”

Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) English poet

Mother Hubberds Tale, line 895; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Life , Fear , Hope , Soul

“If the earth is millions of years old, why don’t we have a fifty thousand year old Bristle Cone Pine tree someplace or a half a million year old? The age of the oldest living thing in the biosphere, the Bristle Cone Pine, indicates a young age for the earth. The evolutionists don’t look at that one because that doesn’t support their theory.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Dissertation for doctor of philosophy in christian education (May 25, 1991)

Age , Support , Tree

“Pride misers with enjoyment, when we have
Delight in things that are but of the mind:
But half humility when we partake
Pleasures that are half wants, the spirit pines
And struggles in its fetters, and disdains
The low base clay to which it is allied.”

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

Erinna
The Golden Violet (1827)

Pleasure

“But our bird knew not of the free blue air,
He had lived in his cage, and his home was there :
No flight had he in the green wood flown —
He pined not for freedom he never had known!
If he had lived amid leaf and bough
It had been cruel to fetter him now;
For I have seen a poor bird die,
And all for love of his native sky.”

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

The Dead Robin
Traits and Trials of Early Life (1836)

Love , Home , Bird , Freedom

“Midnight is a wonderful thing in a vast city—and midnight was upon Vienna. The shops were closed, the windows darkened, and the streets deserted—strange that where so much of life was gathered together there could be such deep repose; yet nothing equals the stillness of a great town at night. Perhaps it is the contrast afforded by memory that makes this appear yet more profound. In the lone valley, and in the green forest, there is quiet even at noon—quiet, at least, broken by sounds belonging alike to day and night. The singing of the bee and the bird, or the voice of the herdsman carolling some old song of the hills—these may be hushed; but there is still the rustle of the leaves, the wind murmuring in the long grass, and the low perpetual whisper of the pine. But in the town—the brick and mortar have no voices of their own. Nature is silent—her soft, sweet harmonies are hushed in the great human tumult—man, and man only, is heard. Through many hours of the twenty-four, the ocean of existence rolls on with a sound like thunder—a thousand voices speak at once. The wheels pass and re-pass over the stones—music, laughter, anger, the words of courtesy and of business, mingle together—the history of a day is the history of all time. The annals of life but repeat themselves.”

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

The Monthly Magazine

Life , Music , History , Business

“If you want a peaceful place to dwell
Cold Mountain is guaranteed forever
A light wind blows softly in the pines
The sound is good when you are close
One old man sits beneath the trees
Reading Lao Tzu and Huang Ti, mumbling
I could not find the world if I searched ten years
I've forgotten the road by which I came”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Variant, lines 5–8:
Under a tree I'm reading
Lao-tzu, quietly perusing.
Ten years not returning,
I forgot the way I had come.
Translated by Katsuki Sekida[citation needed]
Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

World , Peace , Search , Mountain

“Under the yaller pines I house,
When sunshine makes 'em all sweet-scented,
An' hear among their furry boughs
The baskin' west-wind purr contented.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

No. 10.
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series II (1866)

Housing

“It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction … in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

"How to make our ideas clear,” Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (January 1878)

Idea

“Lone upon a mountain, the pine-trees wailing round him,
Lone upon a mountain the Grecian youth is laid;
Sleep, mystic sleep, for many a year has bound him,
Yet his beauty, like a statue's pale and fair, is undecay'd.
When will he awaken?”

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

The Monthly Magazine

Youth , Beauty , Mountain , Sleep

“I divined and chose a distant place to dwell
T'ien T'ai: what more is there to say?
Monkeys cry where valley mists are cold
My grass gate blends with the color of the crags
I pick leaves to thatch a hut among the pines
Scoop out a pond and lead a runnel from the spring
By now I am used to doing without the world
Picking ferns I pass the years that are left”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T'ang Poet Han-shan

World , Color , Spring , Grass

“Ah, better to love in the lowliest cot
Than pine in a palace alone.”

George Whyte-Melville (1821–1878) Scottish writer

Chastelar.

Love

“Whether nature gives me a right, or whether God, the people's choice, etc., does so, all of that is the same foreign right, a right that I do not give or take to myself. Thus the Communists say, equal labour entitles man to equal enjoyment. […] No, equal labour does not entitle you to it, but equal enjoyment alone entitles you to equal enjoyment. Enjoy, then you are entitled to enjoyment. But, if you have laboured and let the enjoyment be taken from you, then – ‘it serves you right.’ If you take the enjoyment, it is your right; if, on the contrary, you only pine for it without laying hands on it, it remains as before, a, ‘well-earned right’ of those who are privileged for enjoyment. It is their right, as by laying hands on it would become your right.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Cambridge 1995, p. 170, 171
The Ego and Its Own (1844)

God , People , Nature

“Yes mam. I'm sorry you've had such troubles.
Mm-hmm. Sorry. Don’t need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.”

Cormac McCarthy book Outer Dark

Outer Dark (1968)

Death , People , Way , Housing

“The grass so little has to do,—
A sphere of simple green,
With only butterflies to brood,
And bees to entertain,

And stir all day to pretty tunes
The breezes fetch along,
And hold the sunshine in its lap
And bow to everything;

And thread the dews all night, like pearls,
And make itself so fine,-
A duchess were too common
For such a noticing.

And even when it dies, to pass
In odors so divine,
As lowly spices gone to sleep,
Or amulets of pine.

And then to dwell in sovereign barns,
And dream the days away,—
The grass so little has to do,
I wish I were a hay!”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Nature, p. 112
Collected Poems (1993)

Dreams , Sleep , Grass , Bee

“What a thing it is to lie there all day in the fine breeze, with the pine needles dropping on one, only to return to the hotel at night so hungry that the dinner, however homely, is a fete, and the menu finer reading than the best poetry in the world! Yet we are to leave all this for the glare and blaze of Nice and Monte Carlo; which is proof enough that one cannot become really acclimated to happiness. (10 September 1902) in the village of Cavalaire, France.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

Source: Willa Cather in Europe (1956), Ch. 13

Lie , World , Home , Reading

“In the lap of hoary Europe lie her children ill at rest,
Reaching hands of supplication to their brethren of the West;
Pale about the lifeless fountain of their ancient freedom, wait
Till the angel move its waters and avenge their stricken state.
Let me then, a new crusader, to the eastward set my face,
Wake the fires of old tradition on each sacred altar-place,
Till a trodden people rouse them, with a clamor as divine
As the winds of autumn roaring through the clumps of forest-pine.
I myself would seize their banner; they should follow where it led,
To the triumph of the victors or the pallor of the dead.”

Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908) American poet, critic, and essayist

"Flood-Tide" (1860).

Children , People , Lie , Angels

“Among the various forms of science which are reaching and affecting the new popular tradition, we have reckoned Anthropology. Pleasantly enough, Anthropology has herself but recently emerged from that limbo of the unrecognised in which Psychical Research is pining.”

Andrew Lang (1844–1912) Scots poet, novelist and literary critic

Andrew Lang (1900) "[ Anthropology and Religion]", In: The Making of Religion, (Chapter II), Longmans, Green, and C°, London, New York and Bombay, 1900, pp. 39–64.

Science