Ralph Waldo Emerson Tree Quotations

The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent.

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

In the woods we return to reason and faith.

Live in the fields, and God will give you lectures on natural philosophy every day.

A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engraffed with a foreign stock.

As sunbeams stream through liberal space And nothing jostle or displace, So waved the pine-tree through my thought And fanned the dreams it never brought.

It is the same among the men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? In persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible?

If you believe in the soul, do not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of cause and effect.

As the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, so should you stop off your miscellaneous activity and concentrate your force on one or a few points.

Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend, Unnerves his strength, invites his end.

Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.

I see my trees repair their boughs.