Tree Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Orcs, and talking trees, and leagues of grass, and galloping riders, and glittering caves, and white towers and golden halls, and battles, and tall ships sailing, all these passed before Sam's mind.

J. R. R. Tolkien

All elongated objects, such as sticks, tree-trunks and umbrellas (the opening of these last being comparable to an erection) may stand for the male organ... Boxes, cases, chests, cupboards, and ovens represent the uterus... Rooms in dreams are usually women... Many landscapes in dreams, especially any containing bridges or wooded hills, may clearly be recognized as descriptions of the genitals.

My dear Theo, Thanks for your letter of this morning. Yesterday I saw the Corot exhibition. It included a painting of the 'Mount of Olives'; I'm glad he painted that. On the right, a group of olive trees, dark against the darkening blue sky; in the background hills covered with shrubs and a couple of tall trees, above them the evening star.... I've also seen the Louvre and the Luxembourg, as you can imagine. The Ruisdaels in the Louvre are magnificent, especially 'The bush', 'The breakwater' and 'The ray of sunlight'. I wish you could see the small Rembrandts there, the 'Supper at Emmaus', and two pendants, 'The philosophers'.

Vincent van Gogh

I expect a time when, or rather an integrity by which, a man will get his coat as honestly and as perfectly fitting as a tree itsbark. Now our garments are typical of our conformity to the ways of the world, i.e., of the devil, and to some extent react on us and poison us, like that shirt which Hercules put on.

Henry David Thoreau

At a well in a yard they met a man who was beating a boy. The stick burst into a flower in the mans hand. He tried to drop it, but it stuck to his hand. His arm became a branch, his body the trunk of a tree, his feet took root.

Haldir had gone on and was now climbing to the high flet. As Frodo prepared to follow him, he laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree's skin and of the life within it. He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself.

J. R. R. Tolkien

I give you joy of having left Winchester. Now you may own how miserable you were there; now it will gradually all come out, your crimes and your miseries — how often you went up by the Mail to London and threw away fifty guineas at a tavern, and how often you were on the point of hanging yourself, restrained only, as some ill-natured aspersion upon poor old Winton has it, by the want of a tree within some miles of the city.

The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. [...] The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain.

In Matthew 12:23 Christ says: Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, as if to say: Let the one who wishes to have good fruit begin by planting a good tree. Therefore, let the person who wishes to do good works being not with the works but with the believing, for this alone makes a person good.

I will be gone from here and sing my songs/ In the forest wilderness where the wild beasts are,/ And carve in letters on the little trees/ The story of my love, and as the trees/ Will grow letters too will grow, to cry/ In a louder voice the story of my love.

Look sharply after your thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen on your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear; and you shall never find that perception again; never, I say — but perhaps years, ages, and I know not what events and worlds may lie between you and its return!

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature, such as it is, weak or strong, and the thing which pleases us. Whatever is formed according to this standard pleases us, be it house, song, discourse, verse, prose, woman, birds, rivers, trees, room, dress, and so on. Whatever is not made according to this standard displeases those who have good taste.

Then was I as a tree whose boughs did bend with fruit; but in one night, a storm or robbery, call it what you will, shook down my mellow hangings, nay, my leaves, and left me bare to weather.

William Shakespeare

The Admiral says that he never beheld so fair a thing: trees all along the river, beautiful and green, and different from ours, with flowers and fruits each according to their kind, many birds and little birds which sing very sweetly.

Christopher Columbus

I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

She tapped on the window with her embossed hairbrush. They were too far off to hear. The drone of the trees was in their ears; the chirp of birds; other incidents of garden life, inaudible, invisible to her in the bedroom, absorbed them. Isolated on a green island, hedged about with snowdrops, laid with a counterpane of puckered silk, the innocent island floated under her window. Only George lagged behind.

I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world… And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom.

The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star.

G. K. Chesterton

No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Hinduism is a living organism liable to growth and decay subject to the laws of Nature. One and indivisible at the root, it has grown into a vast tree with innumerable branches. The changes in the season affect it. It has its autumn and its summer, its winter and its spring. It is, and is not, based on scriptures. It does not derive its authority from one book. Non violence has found the highest expression and application in Hinduism.

To every plant there are two powers; one shoots down as rootlet, and one upward as tree.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.

Jean-Paul Sartre

For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie smoothly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can't be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance.

At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen, You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun. And the trees in the Shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten, And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.

Rudyard Kipling

Tongues I'll hang on every tree
That shall civil sayings show....

William Shakespeare