"There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature. They are like gigantic trees that we sometimes see on the banks of a stream; which, by their vast and deep roots, penetrating through the mere surface, and laying hold on the very foundations of the earth, preserve the soil around them from being swept away by the ever-flowing current, and hold up many a neighboring plant, and perhaps worthless weed, to perpetuity."
Tree quotes
Tree
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Tree quotes (page 34 of 121)
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"The Indians with surprise found the mouldering trees of their forests suddenly teeming with ambrosial sweet; and nothing, I am told, can exceed the greedy relish with which they banquet for the first time upon this unbought luxury of the wilderness."
"There is something nobly simple and pure in a taste for the cultivation of forest trees."
"On the course, what is feared is like a magnet. Water, bunkers, trees, ravines, high grass - whatever you fear turns magnetic."
"The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people."
"Down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way, till a void boundless as the nether sky appeared beneath us, and we held by the roots of trees and hung over this immensity; but I said: if you please we will commit ourselves to this void and see whether providence is here also."
"A tree there is that from its topmost bough Is half all glittering flame and half all green Abounding foliage moistened with the dew; And half is half and yet is all the scene; And half and half consume what they renew."
"I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang."
"Caddy smelled like trees."
"Look at these poisonous color maps where flesh trees grow from human sacrifices; listen to these sniggering half-heard words of tenderness and doom from lips spotted with decay"
"Hang there like fruit, my soul, Till the tree die!"
"I had rather be a Kitten, and cry mew, Than one of these same Meeter Ballad-mongers: I had rather heare a Brazen Candlestick turn'd, Or a dry Wheele grate on the Axle-tree, And that would set my teeth nothing an edge, Nothing so much, as mincing Poetrie."
"'Tis thought the king is dead; we will not stay. The bay trees in our country are all wither'd."
"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."
"Energy in a nation is like sap in a tree; it rises from bottom up."
"In the gentle evening freeze, by the whispering shady trees I will find sanctuary in the Lord."
"The trees come up to my window like the yearning voice of the dumb earth"
"Why don't you conceive of God as an ally who is coming, who has been approaching since time began, the one who will someday arrive, the fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? Why not project his birth into the future, and live your life as an excruciating and lyrical moment in the history of a prodigious pregnancy?"
"Love resembles a tree: it bends under its own weight, deeply rooted in our being and sometimes turns green in the ruins of a heart."
"There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree."