Hal Borland Quotes

#1. To see a hillside white with dogwood bloom is to know a particular ecstasy of beauty, but to walk the gray Winter woods and find the buds which will resurrect that beauty in another May is to partake of continuity.

Hal Borland

#2. Time has its own dimensions, and neither the sun nor the clock can encompass them all.

Hal Borland

#3. April is a promise that May is bound to keep.

Hal Borland

#4. Weekend planning is a prime time to apply the Deathbed Priority Test: On your deathbed, will you wish you'd spent more prime weekend hours grocery shopping or walking in the woods with your kids?

Hal Borland

#5. He who travels west travels not only with the sun but with history.

Hal Borland

#6. [The Christmas story] is as simple as was the Man himself and His teaching. SA simple as the Sermon on the Mount which still remains as the ultimate basis ... of the belief of free men of good will everywhere.

Hal Borland

#7. For all his learning or sophistication, man still instinctively reaches towards that force beyond. Only arrogance can deny its existence, and the denial falters in the face of evidence on every hand. In every tuft of grass, in every bird, in every opening bud, there it is.

Hal Borland

#8. Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.

Hal Borland

#9. There are no limits to either time or distance, except as man himself may make them. I have but to touch the wind to know these things.

Hal Borland

#10. Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.

Hal Borland

#11. Catch a vista of maples in that long light and you see Autumn glowing through the leaves ... The promise of gold and crimson is there among the branches, though as yet it is achieved on only a stray branch, an impatient limb or an occasional small tree which has not yet learned to time its changes.

Hal Borland

#12. A root, a stem, a leaf, some means of capturing sunlight and air and making food - in sum, a plant. The green substance of this earth, the chlorophyll, is all summed up in the plants. Without them we perish, all of us who are flesh and blood.

Hal Borland

#13. Man is not an aquatic animal, but from the time we stand in youthful wonder beside a Spring brook till we sit in old age and watch the endless roll of the sea, we feel a strong kinship with the waters of this world.

Hal Borland

#14. The most unhappy thing about conservation is that it is never permanent. Save a priceless woodland or an irreplaceable mountain today, and tomorrow it is threatened from another quarter.

Hal Borland

#15. Time after time ... today's crisis shrinks to next week's footnote to a newly headline disaster.

Hal Borland

#16. There it is, fog, atmospheric moisture still uncertain in destination, not quite weather and not altogether mood, yet partaking of both.

Hal Borland

#17. You fight dandelions all weekend, and late Monday afternoon there they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity.

Hal Borland

#18. You cn't be suspicious of a tree, accuse a bird or squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet

Hal Borland

#19. Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity; but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?

Hal Borland

#20. Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable ... the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street ... by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.

Hal Borland

#21. Man is wise and constantly in quest of more wisdom; but the ultimate wisdom, which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls forth faith rather than reason.

Hal Borland

#22. There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter. One is the January thaw. The other is the seed catalogues.

Hal Borland

#23. A frontier is never a place; it is a time and a way of life.

Hal Borland

#24. For anyone who lives in the oak-and-maple area of New England, there is a perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October.

Hal Borland

#25. Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.

Hal Borland

#26. The owl, that bird of onomatopoetic name, is a repetitious question wrapped in feathery insulation especially for Winter delivery.

Hal Borland

#27. No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.

Hal Borland

#28. If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.

Hal Borland

#29. As I stood and watched the mists slowly rising this morning I wondered what view was more beautiful than this.

Hal Borland

#30. A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire, in magnitude at least, but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart.

Hal Borland

#31. October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again.

Hal Borland

#32. The earth turns, and the seasons, and for all his pride and power man cannot temper the winds or change their course. They are the unseen tides that shape our days and our years.

Hal Borland

#33. The ultimate wisdom which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls faith rather than reason.

Hal Borland

#34. There are some things, but not too many, toward which the countryman knows he must be properly respectful if he would avoid pain, sickness and injury. Nature is neither punitive nor solicitous, but she has thorns and fangs as wells as bowers and grassy banks.

Hal Borland

#35. All walking is discovery. On foot we take the time to see things whole.

Hal Borland

#36. He who walks may see and understand. You can study all America from one hilltop, if your eyes are open and your mind is willing to reach. But first you must walk to that hill.

Hal Borland

#37. For the Fall of the year is more than three months bounded by an equinox and a solstice. It is a summing up without the finality of year's end.

Hal Borland

#38. Any river is really the summation of the whole valley. To think of it as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part.

Hal Borland

#39. Nature seems to look after her own only up to a certain point; beyond that they are supposed to fend for themselves.

Hal Borland

#40. To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.

Hal Borland

#41. A snowdrift is a beautiful thing-if it doesn't lie across the path you have to shovel or block the road that leads to your destination.

Hal Borland

#42. All man has to do is cooperate with the big forces, the sun, the rain, the growing urge. Seeds sprout, stems grow, leaves spread in the sunlight. Man plants, weeds, cultivates and harvests. It sounds simple, and it is simple, with the simplicity of great truths.

Hal Borland

#43. Green, the color of growth, or surgent life, enwraps the land. New green, still as individual as the plants themselves. Cool green, which will merge as the weeks pass, the Summer comes, into a canopy of shade of busy chlorophyll.

Hal Borland

#44. Listen to it, and you are hearing the mighty currents of the air rushing down the latitudes of the earth, currents from the Mackenzie and the Athabasca and the Saskatchewan, and from the prairies and the white Tundra. It is a homeless wind, forever on the move.

Hal Borland

#45. All our yesterdays are summarized in our now, and all the tomorrows are ours to shape.

Hal Borland

#46. The longer I live and the more I read, the more certain I become that the real poems about spring aren't written on paper. They are written in the back pasture and the near meadow, and they are issued in a new revised edition every April.

Hal Borland

#47. March is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes and a laugh in her voice.

Hal Borland

#48. If the voice of the brook was not the first song of celebration, it must have been at least an obbligato for that event.

Hal Borland

#49. The earth's distances invite the eye. And as the eye reaches, so must the mind stretch to meet these new horizons. I challenge anyone to stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see a new expanse not only around him, but in him, too.

Hal Borland

#50. Of all the seasons, autumn offers the most to man and requires the least of him.

Hal Borland

#51. Nothing in nature is as simple as it sometimes seems when reduced to words.

Hal Borland

#52. Consider the wheelbarrow. It may lack the grace of an airplane, the speed of an automobile, the initial capacity of a freight car, but its humble wheel marked out the path of what civilization we still have.

Hal Borland

#53. There is a leisure about walking, no matter what pace you set, that lets down the tension.

Hal Borland

#54. If you ever wondered why fishing is probably the most popular sport in this country, watch that boy beside on the water and you will learn. If you are really perceptive you will. For he already knows that fishing is only one part fish.

Hal Borland

#55. Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.

Hal Borland

#56. Each new season grows from the leftovers from the past. That is the essence of change, and change is the basic law.

Hal Borland