Hal Borland Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.

Hal Borland
Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.

Hal Borland
The owl, that bird of onomatopoetic name, is a repetitious question wrapped in feathery insulation especially for Winter delivery.

Hal Borland
There are some things, but not too many, toward which the countryman knows he must be properly respectful if he would avoid pain, sickness, and injury. Nature is neither punitive nor solicitous, but she has thorns and fangs as well as bowers and grassy banks.

Hal Borland
The year holds one moment, which may last for a week, when tree and bush and vine are on the breathless verge of leafing out.

Hal Borland
Lift your eyes to the nighttime heavens now if you would see the lights of infinity.

Hal Borland
There is folk poetry in the common names; but science, devoted to order and systematic knowledge, insists on classifying and defining. The poet's buttercup is the botanist's Ranunculus. If you would walk with scientist as well as poet, learn both languages.

Hal Borland
The newcomer to the country will find the first signs of "wild life" in his own house. Even before he explores the dooryard he can sharpen his eyes indoors. He may be surprised at the outsiders who want to share that house with him.

Hal Borland
Only the unobservant sees nothing but trees in a forest. Any woodland is a complex community of plants and animal life with its own laws of growth and survival. But if you would know strength and majesty and patience, welcome the company of trees.

Hal Borland
It is the stars that lure man's mind to the endless immensity of a universe so broad that tangible reality can never span it.

Hal Borland
Forget that second-ticking clock. Time is the seed Waiting to fly from the milkweed pod. Time is the speed Of a dragonfly. Time is the rabbit's desperate scut. Time's dimensions are hidden in rocks, In wind and rain, but never in clocks.

Hal Borland
The longer I live and the more I read, the more certain I become that the real poems about spring aren't written on paper. They are written in the back pasture and the near meadow, and they are issued in a new revised edition every April.

Hal Borland
The pond and the wetlands are a world unto themselves. The adventurer there, be he novice or veteran, will be aware of ancient beginnings and insistent change. There he will see those subtle interrelationships of life which the specialist calls ecology.

Hal Borland
Nature is an infinitely complex series of facts; it is not an object lesson, and it is not a ready-made sermon on conduct or morality.

Hal Borland
Trees are the oldest living things we know. Rooted in the earth and reaching for the stars, they partake of immortality.

Hal Borland
There is a fundamental need in man to know three things: who he is, where he lives, and what time it is. With satisfying answers to those three questions, most of us could live in relative peace with the world and ourselves.

Hal Borland
The earth's distances invite the eye. And as the eye reaches, so must the mind stretch to meet these new horizons. I challenge anyone to stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see a new expanse not only around him, but in him, too.

Hal Borland
Give any man a star on which he can fix his eye and he can reach as far as his imagination points the way.

Hal Borland
Each new season grows from the leftovers from the past. That is the essence of change, and change is the basic law.

Hal Borland
Consider the wheelbarrow. It may lack the grace of an airplane, the speed of an automobile, the initial capacity of a freight car, but its humble wheel marked out the path of what civilization we still have.

Hal Borland
As far as man is concerned, he may well be a biological accident, possibly a mutation that resulted from a particularly livid flare-up of sunspots, and consequent radiation, a million and a half or two million years ago.

Hal Borland
I am not quite sure what the earth's business is, but I know it is not the nurturing of Homo sapiens, or ay one species of animal or plant.

Hal Borland
We are the survivors, all of us, not of a man-made holocaust but of infinitely more powerful and enduring forces, the surge of life, the rhythm of change, and the infinity of time.

Hal Borland
Life persists, and so does its ultimate source, call it what you will. Man is a unique form of that life, but not alien to it. He happens to live in the midst of life on this earth, this particular small unit of a universe about which he actually has only a smattering of knowledge.

Hal Borland
There are no idealists in the plant world and no compassion. The rose and the morning glory know mercy. Bindweed, the morning glory, will quickly choke its competitors to death, and the fencerow rose will just as quietly crowd out any other plant that tried to share its roothold. Idealism and mercy are human terms and human concepts.

Hal Borland
Of all the seasons, autumn offers the most to man and requires the least of him.

Hal Borland
Nature seems to look after her own only up to a certain point; beyond that they are supposed to fend for themselves.

Hal Borland
You fight dandelions all week-end, and late Monday afternoon there they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity.

Hal Borland
There are no limits to either time or distance, except as man himself may make them. I have but to touch the wind to know these things.

Hal Borland
Nothing in nature is as simple as it sometimes seems when reduced to words.

Hal Borland