Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
-- Martin Luther
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
Look deep, deep, deep into nature, and then you will understand everything.
-- Albert Einstein
Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets. To plant a pine, one need only own a shovel.
-- Aldo Leopold
I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
-- Aldo Leopold
Just like New Yorkers themselves, the trees in New York [city] work harder than any others in the world.
-- Andy Warhol
Do not be afraid to go out on a limb ... That's where the fruit is.
-- Anonymous
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
-- Bill Vaughan
People who will not sustain trees will soon live in a world which cannot sustain people.
-- Bryce Nelson
Train up a fig tree in the way it should go, and when you are old sit under the shade of it.
-- Charles Dickens
If you are thinking a year ahead, sow a seed.
If you are thinking ten years ahead, plant a tree.
If you are thinking one hundred years ahead, educate the people.
-- Chinese Poet, 500 BC
Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps the singing bird will come.
-- Chinese proverb
No shade tree? Blame not the sun but yourself.
-- Chinese proverb
One generation plants the Trees; another gets the shade.
Keep a green Tree in your heart, and perhaps a singing bird will come.
-- Chinese proverb
A tree uses what comes its way to nurture itself. By sinking its roots deeply into the earth, by accepting the rain that flows towards it, by reaching out to the sun, the tree perfects its character and becomes great. ... Absorb, absorb, absorb. That is the secret of the tree.
-- Deng Ming-Dao, Everyday Tao
Beautification be damned! Urban and community trees should be planted for economic, environmental and social reasons.
-- Donald C. Willeke
"Ever seen a leaf - a leaf from a tree?"
"Yes."
"I saw one recently - a yellow one, a little green, wilted at the edges. Blown by the wind. When I was a little boy, I used to shut my eyes in winter and imagine a green leaf, with veins on it, and the sun shining ..."
"What's this - an allegory?"
"No; why? Not an allegory - a leaf, just a leaf. A leaf is good. Everything's good."
-- Dostoevsky, The Possessed
Dialogue between Kirolov and Stavrogin
I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.
-- Dr. Suess
Every language is an old growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.
-- Dr. Wade Davies
By means of trees, wildlife could be conserved, pollution decreased and the beauty of our landscapes enhanced. This is the way, or at least one of the ways, to spiritual, moral, and cultural regeneration.
-- E.F. Schumacher
The chestnut's proud, and the lilac's pretty, the poplar's gentle and tall, but the plane tree's kind to the poor dull city - I love him best of all.
-- Edith Nesbit, 1858-1924
That each day I may walk unceasingly on the banks of my water, that my soul may repose on the branches of the trees which I planted, that I may refresh myself under the shadow of my sycamore.
-- Egyptian tomb inscription, circa 1400 BC
A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.
-- Elton Trueblood (1900-1994)
He who plants a Tree loves others besides himself.
-- English proverb
The forests are the flags of nature. They appeal to all and awaken inspiring universal feeling. Enter the forest and the boundaries of nations are forgotten. It may be that some time an immortal pine will be the flag of a united and peaceful world.
-- Enos A. Mills
Promises that you make to yourself are often like the Japanese plum tree - they bear no fruit.
-- Francis Marion
I love a crooked tree more than I hate a crooked man.
-- Frank Kramer, Councilman; Feb. 1, 1916; Palo Alto, CA.
The best friend on Earth of man is the tree. When we use the tree respectfully and economically, we have one of the greatest resources of the Earth.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright
Ho! Ho! Ho! to the bottle I go. To heal my heart and drown my woe. Rain may fall and wind may blow, And many miles be still to go, But under a tall tree I will lie, And let the clouds go sailing by.
-- Frodo Baggins - Lord of the Rings, J.R.R.Tolkien
They are beautiful in their peace, they are wise in their silence. They will stand after we are dust. They teach us, and we tend them.
-- Galeain ip - Altiem MacDunelmor
Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
-- George Bernard Shaw
I read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree -- for sure then I should grow to fruit or shade; at least some bird would trust her household to me, and I should be just.
-- George Herbert
There is, I conceive, scarcely any tree that may not be advantageously used in the various combinations of form and color.
-- Gilpin
All theory, dear friend, is grey, but the golden tree of actual life springs ever green.
-- Goethe
God wrote His loveliest poem on the day He made the first tall silver poplar tree.
-- Grace Noll Crowell
You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.
-- Hal Borland (1908-1978), Sundial of the Seasons, 1964
A nation's growth from sea to sea stirs in the heart of a tree.
-- Henry Bunner
What does he plant who plants a tree? He plants the friend of sun and sky; He plants the flag of breezes free; The shaft of beauty, towering high, he plants a home to heaven anigh. For song and mother-croon of bird, in hushed and happy twilight heard - The treble of heaven's harmony. These things he plants who plants a tree.
-- Henry Cuyler Bunner, the Heart of the Tree
A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than the woods and swamps that surround it.
-- Henry David Thoreau
I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
-- Henry David Thoreau, 1817 - 1862
No town can fail of beauty, though its walks were gutters and its houses hovels, if venerable trees make magnificent colonnades along its streets.
-- Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs, 1887
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.
-- Herman Hesse
The snows have dispersed, now grass returns to the fields and leaves to the trees.
-- Horace
As trustees, we ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed.
-- J. Sterling Morton
Other holidays repose upon the past, Arbor Day proposes for the future.
-- J. Sterling Morton
The cultivation of trees is the cultivation of the good, the beautiful and the ennobling in man.
-- J. Sterling Morton
If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
-- Jack Handey
The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!'
-- John F. Kennedy
In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.
-- John Fowles
A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.
-- John Madison
I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!
-- John Muir
God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.
-- John Muir
The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness
-- John Muir
They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum; and they charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see'em. Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
-- Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi
If a tree dies, plant another in its place.
-- Linnaeus
He who plants a tree, plants a hope.
-- Lucy Larcom (poet, educator and editor in the 1800's)
Though a tree grows ever so high, the falling leaves return to the root.
-- Malay proverb
We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorous 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, Pleasures and Regrets, 1896
God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees, and flowers, and clouds, and stars.
-- Martin Luther
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
-- Nelson Henderson
I think that I shall never see, a billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all.
-- Ogden Nash, Song of the Open Road, 1933
There's nothing that keeps its youth, So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Deacon's Masterpiece, 1858
Trees, by virtue of their universal presence, majestic yet human scale, bridging the gap between earth and air, are the rightful symbols of all which humankind aspires to in its relationship with the planet.
-- Oscar Beck
It's one thing not to see the forest for the trees, but then to go on to deny the reality of the forest is a more serious matter.
-- Paul Weiss
When you plant a tree, you plant a legacy.
-- Pepper Provenzano
Trees are the only part of infrastructure that actually appreciate in value while the rest depreciates.
-- Pepper Provenzano
He is like a Tree planted by rivers of water which brings forth fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither.
-- Psalm 1:3
The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the woods we return to reason and faith.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The creation of a thousand forests are in one acorn.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend, unnerves his strength, invites his end.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Woodnotes
Generations pass while some tree stands, and old families last not three oaks.
-- Robert Browning
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree, and climb black branches up a snow-white trunk. Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, but dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
-- Robert Frost, Birch Trees
It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
People in suburbia see trees differently than foresters do. They cherish every one. It is useless to speak of the probability that a certain tree will die when the tree is in someone's backyard .... You are talking about a personal asset, a friend,a monument, not about board feet of lumber.
-- Roger Swain
A tree is a tree - how many more do you need to look at.
-- Ronald Reagan, California Governor
Of all the trees that grow so fair...greater are none beneath the sun than the Oak and Ash and Thorn.
-- Rudyard Kipling
To plant trees is to give body and life to one's dreams of a better world.
-- Russell Page
Trees outstrip most people in the extent and depth of their work for the public good.
-- Sara Ebenreck, American Forests
He that climbs the tall tree has won right to the fruit.
-- Sir Walter Scott
Think of a tree. When you think of a tree, you tend to think of a distinctly defined object; and on a certain level, it is. But when you look more closely at the tree, you will see that ultimately it has no independent existence. When you contemplate it, you will find that it dissolves into an extremely subtle net of relationships that stretches across the universe. The rain that falls on its leaves, the wind that sways it, the soil that nourishes and sustains it, all the seasons and the weather, moonlight and starlight and sunlight - all form part of this tree. As you begin to think about the tree more and more, you will discover that everything in the universe helps to make the tree what it is, that it cannot at any moment be isolated from anything else, and that at every moment its nature is subtly changing.
-- Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
What I know of divine sciences and Holy Scripture I learned in woods and fields. I have had no other masters other than the beeches and oaks.
-- St. Bernard of Clarivaux
You will find more in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.
-- St. Bernard of Clarivaux
Plant Trees until you are planted!'
-- Steve Rasmussen, Nebraska Forest Service District Forester
To exist as a nation, to prosper as a state, and to live as a people, we must have trees
-- Theodore Roosevelt
He that plants a tree loves other besides himself.
-- Thomas Fuller
I never before knew the full value of trees. Under them I breakfast, dine, write, read and receive my company.
-- Thomas Jefferson
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
-- Thomas Jefferson
Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts who decided to stand their ground.
-- Unknown
If what I say resonates with you, it is merely because we are both branches on the same tree.
-- W.B. Yeats
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?
-- Walt Whitman , Song of the Open Road
There is something nobly simple and pure in a taste for the cultivation of forest trees.
-- Washington Irving
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
-- Willa Cather (1873-1947), O Pioneers 1913
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way.
-- William Blake
The groves were God's first temples.
-- William Cullen Bryant
It is no exaggerated praise to call a Tree the grandest, and most beautiful of all productions on earth!
-- William Gilpin
Holy Mother Earth, the trees and all nature, are witnesses of your thoughts and deeds.
-- Winebago saying
Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing "Embraceable You" in spats.
-- Woody Allen