I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
~ Henry David Thoreau
The trees are God's great alphabet:
With them He writes in shining green Across the world His thoughts serene.
~ Leonora Speyer
Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend, Unnerves his strength, invites his end.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Woodnotes
God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods.
But he cannot save them from fools.
~ John Muir
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
~ Willa Cather, 1913
Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable;
with the possible exception of a moose singing Embraceable You
in spats.
~ Woody Allen
If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down?
We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
~ Jack Handey
I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all.
~ Ogden Nash, Song of the Open Road
, 1933
The groves were God's first temples.
~ William Cullen Bryant, A Forest Hymn
For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.
~ Martin Luther
There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it.
~ Minnie Aumonier
It is difficult to realize how great a part of all that is cheerful and delightful in the recollections of our own life is associated with trees.
~ Wilson Flagg
And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.
~ William Shakespeare
Alone with myself The trees bend to caress me The shade hugs my heart.
~ Candy Polgar
Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved.
You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
~ Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982
It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson
He who plants a tree Plants a hope.
~ Lucy Larcom, Plant a Tree
Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
~ George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists, 1903
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
~ J. Lubbock
Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness.
~ Kahlil Gibran
To the great tree-loving fraternity we belong.
We love trees with universal and unfeigned love, and all things that do grow under them or around them - the whole leaf and root tribe.
~ Henry Ward Beecher
I willingly confess to so great a partiality for trees as tempts me to respect a man in exact proportion to his respect for them.
~ James Russell Lowell
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
~ Nelson Henderson
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
~ Bill Vaughn
If I knew I should die tomorrow, I would plant a tree today.
~ Stephen Girard
Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.
~ Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies , 1928
No town can fail of beauty, though its walks were gutters and its houses hovels, if venerable trees make magnificent colonnades along its streets.
~ Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs, 1887
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in their way.
~ William Blake
Trees outstrip most people in the extent and depth of their work for the public good.
~ Sara Ebenreck, American Forests
Why are there trees I never walk under But large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?
~ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1892
There are rich counsels in the trees.
~ Herbert P. Horne
It is well that you should celebrate your Arbor Day thoughtfully, for within your lifetime the nation's need of trees will become serious.
We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship;
but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed;
and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted.
~ Theodore Roosevelt, 1907 Arbor Day Message
The best part of happiness is the pines.
~ Terri Guillemets
To heal mine aching moods, Give me God's virgin woods.
~ Clinton Scollard
Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.
~ John Muir
Oaks are the true conservatives;
They hold old leaves till summer gives A green exchange.
~ Roy Helton, Come Back to Earth
Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees Bending to counterfeit a breeze.
~ James R. Russell
Trees are much like human beings and enjoy each other's company.
Only a few love to be alone.
~ Jens Jensen, Siftings , 1939
A tree which has lost its head will never recover it again, and will survive only as a monument of the ignorance and folly of its Tormentor.
~ George William Curtis
Death is a low chemical trick played on everybody except sequoia trees.
~ J.J. Furnas
Bread and butter, devoid of charm in the drawing-room, is ambrosia eating under a tree.
~ Elizabeth Russell
As the poet said, only God can make a tree
- probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
~ Woody Allen