Tree Quotes

A collection of quotes about and with trees.

The very idea of “managing” a forest in the first place is oxymoronic, because a forest is an ecosystem that is by definition self-managing.

Bernd Heinrich, The Trees in My Forest

Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees…to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. – winston churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to canada in 1929.

John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

In a forest of a hundred thousand trees, no two leaves are alike. and no two journeys along the same path are alike.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorours and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours.

Marcel Proust

Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. in their rings we read ancient weather—storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. a forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.

Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.

Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree

When trees burn, they leave the smell of heartbreak in the air.

Jodi Thomas, Welcome to Harmony

Rilke wrote: ‘These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.’

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

I’m planting a tree to teach me to gather strength from my deepest roots.

Andrea Koehle Jones, The Wish Trees

To be poor and be without trees, is to be the most starved human being in the world. to be poor and have trees, is to be completely rich in ways that money can never buy.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, The Faithful Gardener: A Wise Tale About That Which Can Never Die

If you really want to eat, keep climbing. the fruits are on the top of the tree. stretch your hands and keep stretching them. success is on the top, keep going.

Israelmore Ayivor

Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `that is an oak tree’, or `that is a banyan tree’, the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? to come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known

“Look: the trees exist; the houses we dwell in stand there stalwartly. only we pass by it all, like a rush of air. and everything conspires to keep quiet about us, half out of shame perhaps, half out of some secret hope.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“I never see that prettiest thing- a cherry bough gone white with spring- but what i think, “”how gay ‘twould be to hang me from a flowering tree.”

Dorothy Parker, Not So Deep As A Well: Collected Poems

“Two trees a portion of your soul has been entwined with mine a gentle kind of togetherness, while separately we stand. as two trees deeply rooted in separate plots of ground, while their topmost branches come together, forming a miracle of lace against the heavens.”

Janet Miles, Images of Women in Transition

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