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Trees Quotes

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Trees Quotes

“(I am particularly fond of the latter model [i.e., the tree-filled residential squares of London]. which you can see followed in a lovely way in Chicago's Washington Square Park, the city's oldest. The Newberry Library sits on the north side of the square, and one of the great delights of using that excellent library involves sitting at a table and gazing through tall windows at the park's trees. Of course, this means that you don't get much work done and feel guilty later, but life consists mainly of such tradeoffs.) (The Life of Trees)”

“Long-term goals are like planting a tree that will bear fruits only after a few years. These trees take a long time to grow but they provide lasting benefits. Unlike the seasonal crop that gives you benefits only once, the trees keep bearing fruits year after year without much effort. However, you have to constantly work for a couple of years even when no fruit is in sight. You must have faith and the motivation to be able to put in continuous effort for a long time.”

“The experience of joy will for the first time give you the experience of a beauty that is eternal. It will also give you an insight into the phenomenon of beauty. This insight will not only make you beautiful, it also transforms  your whole world. Then the whole world becomes beautiful, because the world reflects you. The world is a mirror of you. The trees, the flowers, the animals, the people, the rivers and the mountains will reflect you. You cannot get more than you give. Many people have not any beautiful to put into life, which is why they live such miserable, joyless, and bored lives. There may be a beautiful sunset, but they do not have the eyes to see it. There may be a bird singing, but they are deaf to hear it.They have no insight into beauty. When you have an insight into beauty, you will find beauty everywhere. Then you have the eyes to see, and the ears to hear. You will find beauty in a tree,in a stone, in a flower, in an animal or in the sky. You will find awe and wonder, and you will be thrilled and moved. To know real beauty, one has to go into deep silence. One has to become more aware, alert and silent. Then your heart becomes purified, and you become transformed. You start feeling yourself as a consciousness, rather than as a mind. Then there is beauty all around you. You have a silence and a grace, and suddenly the world is full of beauty. This is the essence of religious experience. It is only a deep silence that will give beauty, which gives a deep desire to share the experience with others.”

“...a ripple of silence came toward me. As if the wood thrushes and squirrels and moths held their breath while something passed by. My bow was already strung. Quietly, I loosely nocked an arrow. Closer and closer the silence crept. The trees seemed to lean in, their entwined branches locking tighter, a living cage keeping even the smallest of birds from soaring out of the canopy.”

“To the imaginative, it is always something of an adventure to walk down a pleached alley. You enter boldly enough, but soon you find yourself wishing you had stayed outside — it is not air that you are breathing, but silence, the almost palpable silence of trees. And is the only exit that small round hole in the distance? Why, you will never be able to squeeze through that! You must turn back ... too late! The spacious portal by which you entered has in its turn shrunk to a small round hole.”

“Nothing belongs to itself anymore. These trees are yours because you once looked at them. These streets are yours because you once traversed them. These coffee shops and bookshops, these cafés and bars, their sole owner is you. They gave themselves so willingly, surrendering to your perfume. You sang with the birds and they stopped to listen to you. You smiled at the sheepish stars and they fell into your hair. The sun and moon, the sea and mountain, they have all left from heartbreak. Nothing belongs to itself anymore. You once spoke to Him, and then God became yours. He sits with us in darkness now to plot how to make you ours.” K.K.”

“Poetry is seeing everything when there is only one thing. It is looking at a rose but seeing the stars, moons, seas, and trees. It is a truth beyond logic, an experience beyond thought. Poetry is the Earth pausing on its axis in order to manifest itself as a rose.”

“He painted trees as by some special divining instinct of their essential qualities. He understood them. He knew why in an oak forest, for instance, each individual was utterly distinct from its fellows, and why no two beeches in the whole world were alike. People asked him down to paint a favorite lime or silver birch, for he caught the individuality of a tree as some catch the individuality of a horse. How he managed it was something of a puzzle, for he never had painting lessons, his drawing was often wildly inaccurate, and, while his perception of a Tree Personality was true and vivid, his rendering of it might almost approach the ludicrous. Yet the character and personality of that particular tree stood there alive beneath his brush—shining, frowning, dreaming, as the case might be, friendly or hostile, good or evil. It emerged.”

“Nor is it only as a sign of greater gentleness or refinement of mind, but as a proof of the best possible direction of this refinement, that the tendency of the Gothic to the expression of vegetative life is to be admired. That sentence of Genesis, 'I have given thee every green herb for meat,' like all the rest of the book, has a profound symbolical as well as literal meaning. It is not merely the nourishment of the body, but the food of the soul, that is intended. The green herb is, of all nature, that which is most essential to the healthy spiritual life of man. Most of us do not need fine scenery; the precipice and the mountain peak are not intended to be seen by all men, — perhaps their power is greatest. over those who are unaccustomed to them. But trees and fields and flowers were made for all, and are necessary for all. God has connected the labour which is essential to the bodily sustenance with the pleasures which are healthiest for the heart; and while He made the ground stubborn, He made its herbage fragrant, and its blossoms fair. The proudest architecture that man can build has no higher honour than to bear the image and recall the memory of that grass of the field which is, at once, the type and the support of his existence; the goodly building is then most glorious when it is sculptured into the likeness of the leaves of Paradise; and the great Gothic spirit, as we showed it to be noble in its disquietude, is also noble in its hold of nature; it is, indeed, like the dove of Noah, in that she found no rest upon the face of the waters, — but like her in this also, 'Lo, in her mouth was an olive branch, plucked off.”

“Love is the most mysterious experience in life. Love is something that you never fully learn; love is something that you ontinuously go deeper and deeper into. The mystery of love deepens more and more. Love cannot be explained. Love cannot be defined. Love can only be lived, but it can never be understood. Love is so vast, so infinite. If you allow love to happen to, you you are allowing the mystery of life to happen to you. And it is through the mysterious that one comes close to God. Love is the beginning of God. God is so far away, so we need something more human and concrete to approach him. That is what love is. Love is the possibility of reaching God. God is love in its unmanifest state. So never try to make a philosophy of love. There is not other way to know love except existential experience. Unless you experience love you don't know it. Existence needs experience. You have the capacity to know, to see, to feel and to be love. Become a friend to all that is. Become a friend to human beings, to animals, to trees, to birds and to rocks. Create the quality of friendliness. Let it flow towards everyone irrespective of nation, race, caste and creed. And then slowly your consciousness will start becoming universal. Friendship is a way to drop the ego and become egoless. The ego exists by creating enemies, because the ego exists through fight and conflict. The moment the ego disappears, all your boundaries disappears, and you become one with the universe.”

“Meditation is the beginning of becoming  part of existence. The ego creates a separation from existence. The moment we drop the ego, then we find our roots in existence. Then there is no separation anywhere.  Then  God beats in our heart. The same God that flows in the rivers and rises in the sun, circulates in our blood. It is all one. But the contemporary man feels separated and alienated. Never before has it happened on such a vast scale. Almost everybody who is intelligent feels uprooted and alienated. And of one feels alienated, life cannot be a joy. Life is a joy only when we start feeling a home in existence.  Meditation is a help to feel at home with existence, with the trees, the earth, the people and with the animals. Only this experience makes one religious.”

“I wish I were a tree. Tall. Strong. Abiding. Rooted in the spot I stand, impervious to lures that drag the transient here and there. Possessing neither a negligent ear nor a traitorous tongue that would only soak in and breath out rabid gossip. Able to endure fickle shifts in the wind and not bend. Lazing under the fierce sun, weariless, suffering no sweat or burn. Alive, sipping water, quietly providing. How I wish I were a tree.”

“I write our names on the page. What of it, if the paper will be burned? I write our names in the sand. What of it, if the shore will be washed by waves? I write our names on trees that will be cut and benches that will be painted, but what of it? I will keep on writing our names because in this world of ephemera, You and I are the only constant.”

“I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can’t think about them. I live with trees. There are creatures under our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and in addition, they extend impressively in both directions, up and down, shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach.”

“Praise the rain; the seagull dive The curl of plant, the raven talk— Praise the hurt, the house slack The stand of trees, the dignity— Praise the dark, the moon cradle The sky fall, the bear sleep— Praise the mist, the warrior name The earth eclipse, the fired leap— Praise the backwards, upward sky The baby cry, the spirit food— Praise canoe, the fish rush The hole for frog, the upside-down— Praise the day, the cloud cup The mind flat, forget it all— Praise crazy. Praise sad. Praise the path on which we're led. Praise the roads on earth and water. Praise the eater and the eaten. Praise beginnings; praise the end. Praise the song and praise the singer. Praise the rain; it brings more rain. Praise the rain; it brings more rain.”

“A tree has roots in the soil yet reaches to the sky. It tells us that in order to aspire we need to be grounded and that no matter how high we go it is from our roots that we draw sustenance. It is a reminder to all of us who have had success that we cannot forget where we came from. It signifies that no matter how powerful we become in government or how many awards we receive, our power and strength and our ability to reach our goals depend on the people, those whose work remain unseen, who are the soil out of which we grow, the shoulders on which we stand”

“Mother trees have an effect on the oceans as well, as Katsuhiko Matsunaga and his team in Japan had confirmed. The leaves, when they fall in the autumn, contain a very large, complex acid called fulvic acid. When the leaves decompose, the fulvic acid dissolves into the moisture of the soil, enabling the acid to pick up iron. This process is called chelation. The heavy, iron-containing fulvic acid is now ready to travel, leaving the home ground of the mother tree and heading for the ocean. In the ocean it drops the iron. Hungry algae, like phytoplankton, eat it, then grow and divide; they need iron to activate a body-building enzyme called nitrogenase. This set of relationships is the feeding foundation of the ocean This is what feeds the fish and keeps the mammals of the sea, like the whale and the otter healthy.”

“A feeling of calm always fell over her like a cloak of happiness settling on her shoulders when she entered her father’s woods. Tall trees welcomed her under their canopy, offering her protection, while a carpet of yellow lesser celandine, with their shiny star-like flowers and dark green heart-shaped leaves, tickled her ankles as she walked amongst them.”

“This is an ode to life. The anthem of the world. For as there are billions of different stars that make up the sky so, too, are there billions of different humans that make up the Earth. Some shine brighter but all are made of the same cosmic dust. O the joy of being in life with all these people! I speak of differences because they are there. Like the different organs that make up our bodies. Earth, itself, is one large body. Listen to how it howls when one human is in misery. When one kills another, the Earth feels the pang in its chest. When one orgasms, the Earth craves a cigarette. Look carefully, these animals are beauty spots that make the Earth’s face lovelier and more loveable. These oceans are the Earth’s limpid eyes. These trees, its hair. This is an ode to life. The anthem of the world. I will no longer speak of differences, for the similarities are larger. Look even closer. There may be distances between our limbs but there are no spaces between our hearts. We long to be one. We long to be in nature and to run wild with its wildlife. Let us celebrate life and living, for it is sacrilegious to be ungrateful. Let us play and be playful, for it is sacrilegious to be serious. Let us celebrate imperfections and make existence proud of us, for tomorrow is death, and this is an ode to life. The anthem of the world.”

“LONG LIVE... This country is but a wish of the spirit, a counter-sepulcher. In my country, tender proofs of spring and badly dressed birds are preferred to far-off goals. Truth waits for dawn beside a candle. Window glass is neglected. To the watchful, what does it matter? In my country, we don't question a man deeply moved. There is no malignant shadow on the capsized boat. A cool hello is unknown in my country. We borrow only what can be returned increased. There are leaves, many leaves, on the trees in my country. The branches are free to bear no fruits. We don't believe in the good faith of the victor. In my country, we say thank you.”