Why am I writing about trees on an animal blog? Well, it’s because without magnificent trees there’s no life, no animals, no humans. Trees communicate with each other, assist each other, collaborate with fungi and other creatures, and even have memories.
Trees aren’t there only to provide shade or hang a hammock on. They act as giant water pumps because, without trees, every cloud would rain down within 370 mi (600 km) of the coast, leaving the inner parts of the continents dry.
We are also still producing so much CO2 that the trees can’t keep up even though they’re working hard. They gather CO2 from the air and store it inside them. When we cut trees and burn them, we burn the stored CO2 from the trees and that’s a vicious circle that’s contributing to global warming.
For more inspiration, don’t forget to also check out our compilation of 60 Serene Forest Quotes. Unleash the Secret of Forests as well as 72 Intelligent But Blissful Quotes About The Sea.
“The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.”
― George Orwell
Tree Quotes
“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.”
― Khalil Gibran
“Love the trees until their leaves fall off, then encourage them to try again next year.”
― Chad Sugg
“If I were a tree, I would have no reason to love a human.”
― Maggie Stiefvater
“Trees’re always a relief, after people.”
― David Mitchell
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
― William Blake
“A cold wind was blowing from the north, and it made the trees rustle like living things.”
― George R.R. Martin
Over the course of a tree’s life, each tree will raise only one tree child to adulthood.
“At night I dream that you and I are two plants
that grew together, roots entwined,
and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth,
since we are made of earth and rain.”
― Pablo Neruda
“Plants are more courageous than almost all human beings: an orange tree would rather die than produce lemons, whereas instead of dying the average person would rather be someone they are not.”
Tree Quotes
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind. Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things. Their language has been lost. But not the gestures.”
― Vera Nazarian
“If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn’t it just lie there and rot?”
― Chuck Palahniuk
“All our wisdom is stored in the trees.”
― Santosh Kalwar
“Two Trees
A portion of your soul has been
entwined with mine
A gentle kind of togetherness, while
separately we stand.
As two trees deeply rooted in
separate plots of ground,
While their topmost branches
come together,
Forming a miracle of lace
against the heavens.”
― Janet Miles
“You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. In the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.”
― Max Ehrmann
“But the trees seemed to know me. They whispered among themselves and beckoned me nearer. And looking around, I noticed the other small trees and wild plants and grasses had sprung up under the protection of the trees we had placed there. The trees had multiplied! They were moving. In one small corner of the world, Grandfather’s dream was coming true and the trees were moving again.”
― Ruskin Bond
“I’m planting a tree to teach me to gather strength from my deepest roots.”
― Andrea Koehle Jones
“When trees burn, they leave the smell of heartbreak in the air.”
― Jodi Thomas
“Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree’, or `that is a banyan tree’, the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
“To be poor and be without trees, is to be the most starved human being in the world. To be poor and have trees, is to be completely rich in ways that money can never buy.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Trees learn from experience. They have to make a lot of decisions throughout their lifetime.
“To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.”
― Thomas Hardy
“In a forest of a hundred thousand trees, no two leaves are alike. And no two journeys along the same path are alike.”
Tree Quotes
― Paulo Coelho
“Rilke wrote: ‘These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.”
― Gaston Bachelard
“Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather—storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.”
― Anne Michaels
“If you really want to eat, keep climbing. The fruits are on the top of the tree. Stretch your hands and keep stretching them. Success is on the top, keep going.”
― Israelmore Ayivor
“If lightning is the anger of the gods, then the gods are concerned mostly about trees.”
― Lao Tzu
“Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons.”
― Willa Cather
“We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorous and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours.”
― Marcel Proust
Trees don’t have brains but it is thought that they store information and experiences in the sensitive tips of their roots.
“There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.”
― Richard Powers
“Trees are corrupting our parks. They should be arrested for loitering. For deciduous trees, add littering and indecent exposure to that list of offenses.”
― Bauvard
Tree Quotes
“There’s a Chinese saying. ‘When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.’ “
The Chinese engineer smiles. “Good one.”
” ‘When is the next best time? Now.’ “
“Ah! Okay!” The smile turns real. Until today, he has never planted anything. But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.”
― Richard Powers
“Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn’t necessarily expect to witness.”
― Michael Pollan
“The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.”
― George Orwell
“Listen to the trees talking in their sleep,’ she whispered, as he lifted her to the ground. ‘What nice dreams they must have!”
― L.M. Montgomery
“Jaime had never realized that trees made a sound when they grew, and no-one else had realized it either, because the sound is made over hundreds of years in waves of twenty-four hours from peak to peak. Speed it up, and the sound a tree makes is vrooom.”
― Terry Pratchett
“To be without trees would, in the most literal way, to be without our roots.”
― Richard Mabey
Trees can identify what kind of creature is trying to eat their leaves by tasting the creature’s saliva.
“Planting trees, I myself thought for a long time, was a feel-good thing, a nice but feeble response to our litany of modern-day environmental problems. In the last few years, though, as I have read many dozens of articles and books and interviewed scientists here and abroad, my thinking on the issue has changed. Planting trees may be the single most important ecotechnology that we have to put the broken pieces of our planet back together.”
― Jim Robbins
“Shade for a man
And shelter for animals,
Planted in your name,
May you be the same for those around you,
Every year the same.”
― Nancy J. Cavanaugh
“Why pay money for the horror movies? Just go to a street without trees!”
― Mehmet Murat Ildan
“He that planteth a tree is a servant of God, he provideth a kindness for many generations, and faces that he hath not seen shall bless him.”
― Henry Van Dyke
“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
“Good timber does not grow with ease. The stronger the wind the stronger the trees.”
Tree Quotes
― Thomas S Monson
“Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.”
― Karen Joy Fowler
“Trees are great messengers of peace. One of the worst crimes of modern humankind is indiscriminate cutting down of the trees, and forests, in the pursuit of establishing civilization. No wonder, that modern civilized society has everything but peace.”
― Banani Ray
“Do you want to stop an avenger level threat? Then you should raise an army (trees) to fight climate change.”
― Mohith Agadi
“When you’re outnumbered by trees your perspective shifts.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner
“Who else goes to the woods to find peace only to discover themself in the process? I find forests unclutter the mind with each breath the trees afford me.”
― Michael Poeltl
“A forest tree cannot help a lonely tree in its battle for existence, because such a battle requires the knowledge of loneliness!”
― Mehmet Murat Ildan
“In a difficult year, trees may increase their mass by less than one gram! During this time, the tree devotes its limited resources to maintaining the status quo. Like an eternal optimist, the tree concentrates on keeping itself alive until such time that conditions improve.”
― Peter E. Kelly
“The trees need to breathe too just as you and me do.”
Tree Quotes
― Avijeet Das
“How peaceful to be a tree! Trees had only to grow. Trees had no hearts to confuse and complicate things. Trees could not love kings and still disobey them.”
― Kiersten White
“Understand trees to understand humans.”
― Steven Magee
“Every bird, every tree, every flower reminds me what a blessing and privilege it is just to be alive.”
― Marty Rubin
“I prayed to trees. This was easier than praying directly to God. There was nearly always a tree nearby.”
― Sharon Creech
“There’s always an assumption of selflessness in planting a tree. You’re supposed to think, while digging the hole, how far into the future the tree will grow and what shallow, unconvincing weeds we humans are in comparison. Standing by the young sprout, you’re supposed to wonder who will see this tree when it’s full-grown, and you’re bound in duty to consider the serenity of your own grave.”
― Verlyn Klinkenborg
“Listen to the trees to learn their secrets.”
― Steven Magee
“With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. […] Part of you died each year when leaves fell from the tress and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“When we plant trees, we plant the seeds of peace and hope.”
― Wangari Maathai
“All forests in the world need to be given the same name, so that people can understand that there is only one forest in the world and that every burning forest is his own forest, no matter where in the world!”
― Mehmet Murat Ildan
“What a joy it is to see, trees dancing in the rain!”
― Charmaine J Forde
“Be like the tree, change your leaves and keep your roots… Change your ideas and keep your principles!”
― Tibetan proverb
“Be still within a forest and you will appreciate what it is like to be a tree,”
― Anthony T. Hincks
References:
- Wohlleben P 2017, The Hidden Life of Trees, Harper Collins Publishers