Forests Quotes

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
― Herman Hesse, Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
― John Muir

“The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil - rich, fertile soil.
She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.
She could plant a forest inside herself.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Forests may be gorgeous but there is nothing more alive than a tree that learns how to grow in a cemetery.”
― Andrea Gibson

“I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.”
― Gustave Flaubert, November

“All forests have their own personality. I don't just mean the obvious differences, like how an English woodland is different from a Central American rain forest, or comparing tracts of West Coast redwoods to the saguaro forests of the American Southwest... they each have their own gossip, their own sound, their own rustling whispers and smells. A voice speaks up when you enter their acres that can't be mistaken for one you'd hear anyplace else, a voice true to those particular tress, individual rather than of their species.”
― Charles de Lint, The Onion Girl

“What an irony it is that these living beings whose shade we sit in,
whose fruit we eat, whose limbs we climb, whose roots we water, to
whom most of us rarely give a second thought, are so poorly
understood. We need to come, as soon as possible, to a profound
understanding and appreciation for trees and forests and the vital
role they play, for they are among our best allies in the uncertain
future that is unfolding.”
― Jim Robbins, The Man Who Planted Trees: Lost Groves, Champion Trees, and an Urgent Plan to Save the Planet

“The world has a very serious problem, my friend' Shiva went on. 'Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich -- like me -- live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we're pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though...”
― Ramez Naam, Crux

“Such is the dichotomy of forests. Even the smallest remembers what it was to cover nations, and the shadows they contain will whisper the knowledge to anyone who listens.”
― Seanan McGuire, Across the Green Grass Fields

“The forest has shrunk
And fear has expanded,
The forests have dwindled,
There are less animals now,
less courage and less lightning,
less beauty
and the moon lies bare,
deflowered by force and
then abandoned.”
― Visar Zhiti, The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry

“If you go to a desert, you will hear this mysterious voice: Be wise, protect your forests!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“It was the forest’s fault. Those two handsome woodcutters. An evil place, the forest, everyone knew it, full of temptations and imps...”
― Tanith Lee

“An English wood is like a good many other things in life-- very promising at a distance, but a hollow mockery when you get within. You see daylight on both sides, and the sun freckles the very bracken. Our woods need the night to make them seem what they ought to be--what they once were, before our ancestors' descendants demanded so much more money, in these so much more various days. ("The Striding Place")”
― Gertrude Atherton, The Bell in the Fog & Other Stories

“Even the wind carries the memory of forests long gone.”
― Lawrence Nault

“In a Permacapital Economy, the economic value of natural ecosystems and resources - including trees, forests, rivers, oceans, wildlife, insects, bacteria, fungi, etc - and their services to humans must be accounted for in the prices of products and services, and the accounting statements used to report on financial status.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, An Assessment of Historical Economic Frameworks & A Prescription of Permacapital Economics: A Doctoral Paper: Edition 1

“The wild is where I feel at home; it reveals the true essence of who I am.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya

“Get out of your little world, go to the forest; get out of your little house, move into the big house! Why big? Because in the mysterious silence of a forest, the local problems of daily life leave you, you step out of that mouse hole, and suddenly you're alone with infinity, with the universe! Welcome to the real big house!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“If you cannot call it forest, call it sanctuary.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

“Forests are really just a repetition of patterns; it’s why people lose their minds in forests and also on oceans. The human brain needs disruption, I think, and that’s why we make things. You could say that an artist, for instance, finds patterns in everything but I think probably what an artist is really there to do is to tear a big hole in the maddening patterns, to create something that is so itself that it repels everything around it. I’m all for artificiality, is what I’m saying. It’s what humans bring to the table.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“I’ll meet you in the woods, after the first monsoon rain.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya

“The power in the Wood isn't some blind hating beast; it can think and plan, and work towards its own ends. It can see into the hearts of men, all the better to poison them.”
― Naomi Novik, Uprooted

“The Kashmir Himalaya is a biodiversity hotspot, home to hundreds of medicinal and aromatic plants used in Ayurveda, Unani, Tibetan, and folk medicine. These herbs grow in pristine alpine meadows, high-altitude valleys, and forest belts, enriched by glacial waters and clean mountain air.”
― Ginkgo Gulzar

“The forest is where life resides.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

“I left all that, followed a crystalline river
into thick woodlands, idleness deepening.”
― Wang Wei, The Selected Poems of Wang Wei

“No one seen. Among empty mountains,
hints of drifting voice, faint, no more.

Entering these deep woods, late sunlight
flares on green moss again, and rises.”
― Wang Wei, The Selected Poems of Wang Wei

“In mountain forests, I've lost myself completely:
identity's nothing but the role we play in public.”
― Wang Wei, The Selected Poems of Wang Wei

“In these twilight years, I love tranquility
alone. Mind free of all ten thousand affairs,

self-regard free of all those grand schemes,
I return to my old forest, knowing empty.”
― Wang Wei, The Selected Poems of Wang Wei

“Earlier today, outside the cabin, the sudden deer were a supreme
headache of beauty. Don’t they know I am trying to be alone
& at peace? In theory I am alone & really I am hidden,
which is a fine temporary substitute for peace”
― Chen Chen, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

“If a tree falls in the forest
with no European to hear it, did it really exist before the 1500s?”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“wandering
across the river
over the quiet woodland
rustling
among the pines
the mountain wind”
― Meeta Ahluwalia