Henry David Thoreau Tree Quotations

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured and far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak.

It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.

I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.

Trees indeed have hearts.

One is wise to cultivate the tree that bears fruit in our soul.

Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.

"Hear! hear!" screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, "winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it."

I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known.

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.

Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds!

I expect a time when, or rather an integrity by which, a man will get his coat as honestly and as perfectly fitting as a tree itsbark. Now our garments are typical of our conformity to the ways of the world, i.e., of the devil, and to some extent react on us and poison us, like that shirt which Hercules put on.

Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.

The tree of Knowledge is a Tree of Knowledge of good and evil.

Where the citizen uses a mere sliver or board, the pioneer uses the whole trunk of a tree.

In the planting of the seeds of most trees, the best gardeners do no more than follow Nature, though they may not know it.

The sugar maple is remarkable for its clean ankle. The groves of these trees looked like vast forest sheds, their branches stopping short at a uniform height, four or five feet from the ground, like eaves, as if they had been trimmed by art, so that you could look under and through the whole grove with its leafy canopy, as under a tent whose curtain is raised.

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

I found that they knew but little of the history of their race, and could be entertained by stories about their ancestors as readily as any way .

Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts who stood their ground.

Even trees do not die without a groan.

Show me two villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the other a merely trivial and treelesswaste, or with only a single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate drinkers.