Tree Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.

Friedrich Nietzsche

But words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf.

Hang there like a fruit, my soul, Till the tree die! -Posthumus Leonatus Act V, Scene V

William Shakespeare

Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees... to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilization.

To his son, Randolph Churchill, during a trip to Canada, on 11 August 1929

Winston Churchill

"Hear! hear!" screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, "winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it."

Henry David Thoreau

Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers' breath, of ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine.

I exclude the hypothesis of complete originality on [Charles] Lever's part, because a man can no more be completely original in that sense than a tree can grow out of air.

George Bernard Shaw

Everyone who enjoys thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principal thing to it is the seed.—Herein lies the difference between them that create and them that enjoy.

Friedrich Nietzsche

But I remember more dearly autumn afternoons in bottoms that lay intensely silent under old great trees

He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees
and changing leaves.

She stepped out from among their shifting confusion of lovely lights and shadows. A circle of grass, smooth as a lawn, met her eyes, with dark trees dancing all around it. And then —Oh Joy! For he was there: the huge Lion, shining white in the moonlight, with his huge black shadow underneath him.

Life is a beautiful, magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish. … The trouble is you won't fight. You've given up. But there's something just as inevitable as death. And that's life. Think of the power of the universe — turning the Earth, growing the trees. That's the same power within you — if you'll only have the courage and the will to use it.

Charlie Chaplin

Experiment to me Is every one I meet If it contain a Kernel? The Figure of a Nut Presents upon a Tree Equally plausibly, But Meat within, is requisite To Squirrels, and to Me.

Emily Dickinson

There was a little corner of his mind that was still his own, and light came through it, as though a chink in the dark: light out of the past. It was actually pleasant, I think, to hear a kindly voice agin, bringing up memories of wind, and trees, and sun on the grass, and such forgotten things.

J. R. R. Tolkien

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have seen in many places housing which has been developed under government influences, but I have never seen any projects in which governments have played their part which have fountains and statues and grass and trees, which are as important to the concept of the home as the roof itself.

John F. Kennedy

Go to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, and find out.

Rudyard Kipling

It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.

These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.

Sometimes we see a cloud that's dragonish;
A vapor sometime like a bear or lion,
A tower'd citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon 't.

William Shakespeare

My worthy friend, gray are all theories
And green alone Life's golden tree.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

'That was the burden,' she mused, 'laid on me in the cradle; murmured by waves; breathed by restless elm trees; crooned by singing women; what we must rememeber; what we would forget.'

One man will say a thing of himself without comprehending its excellence, in which another will discern a marvelous series of conclusions, which makes us affirm that it is no longer the same expression, and that he is no more indebted for it to the one from whom he has learned it, than a beautiful tree belongs to the one who cast the seed, without thinking of it, or knowing it, into the fruitful soil which caused its growth by its own fertility.

When I have plucked the rose, I cannot give it vital growth again, It needs must wither. I'll smell it on the tree.

William Shakespeare