Top 100 Old Tree Quotes
#1. Just touching that old tree was truly moving to me because when you touch these trees, you have such a sense of the passage of time, of history. It's like you're touching the essence, the very substance of life.
Kim Novak
#2. While there may be no "right" way to value a forest or a river, there is a wrong way, which is to give it no value at all. How do we decide the value of a 700-year-old tree? We need only to ask how much it would cost to make a new one, or a new river, or even a new atmosphere.
Paul Hawken
#3. I love looking at you, hundred-year-old tree, loaded with shoots and boughs as though you were a stripling. Teach me the secret of growing old like you, open to life, to youth, to dreams, as somebody aware that youth and age are merely steps towards eternity.
Helder Camara
#4. The large white owl that with eye is blind, That hath sate for years in the old tree hollow, Is carried away in a gust of wind.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#5. Soft as butter they can be, and yet sometimes as tough as old tree-roots.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#6. An old horse, an old bird, an old man, an old tree, they all represent a great survival in the jungle of cosmos; they deserve to be applauded and respected!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#7. The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.
Flannery O'Connor
#8. Perspective is what allows us to step back and see the entire forest instead of just the same old tree we keep running into again and again.
Bill Crawford
#9. A rigid old tree like me--it snaps in a raging storm. The pliant tree bends in the rain and survives.
Emery Lord
#10. Yet I will look upon thy face again, My own romantic Bronx, and it will be A face more pleasant than the face of men. Thy waves are old companions, I shall see A well remembered form in each old tree And hear a voice long loved in thy wild minstrelsy.
Joseph Rodman Drake
#11. Be rather like a strong, big old tree, firmly anchored in your soil, deeply rooted, knowing yourself, knowing what you are anchored into, which is Source and Truth, and no currents from the outside world, no matter how strong, have any sway over you.
Maha Devi Li Ra La
#12. We are all but recent leaves on the same old tree of life and if this life has adapted itself to new functions and conditions, it uses the same old basic principles over and over again. There is no real difference between the grass and the man who mows it.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
#13. The vine that has grown old on an old tree falls with the ruin of that tree, and through that bad companionship must perish with it.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#14. I must stay under the old tree in the midst of the long grass, the luxury of the leaves, and the song in the very air. It seems as if I could feel all the glowing life the sunshine gives and the south winds calls into being.
Richard Jefferies
#15. For it is the young tree grown out of the old root which shall illuminate what the old tree has been in its wonders.
Jakob Bohme
#16. Well, that was life. It was an old tree, and the old passed on. Probably they did not mind. There came a time when all sap ran slowly, and the peace of age with all things behind it merged easily into the peace of death. The difficult thing was to be young.
Mary Roberts Rinehart
#18. Sweeney took a step closer to Wednesday. "Call me a freeloader, will you, you doomed old creature? You cold-blooded, heartless old tree-hanger." His face was turning a deep, angry red.
Wednesday put out his hands, palms up, pacific. "Foolishness, Sweeney. Watch where you put your words.
Neil Gaiman
#19. The longer it possesseth a man the more he will delight in it, and the older he groweth the more he shall be subject to it; for it dulleth the spirits, and destroyeth the body as ivy doth the old tree, or as the worm that engendereth in the kernal of the nut.
Walter Raleigh
#20. Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family
Oh how hideous it is
To see three generations of one house gathered together!
It is like an old tree with shoots,
And with some branches rotted and falling.
Ezra Pound
#21. The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world.
Jack Kerouac
#22. It is Pau-kala. The branch is still bare. The old tree's leaves will never return - they are a memory and a song. But there is a sapling, there is a sapling right beside that old tree, and it's trembling with promise. There will be a spring again.
Alma Alexander
#23. Old fat spider spinning in a tree! Old fat spider can't see me! Attercop! Attercop! Won't
J.R.R. Tolkien
#24. I grew it - sorry, drew it - for this book, if for no other reason than to illustrate the old saying that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Connor Franta
#25. Flowers are lovely; love is flower-like;
Friendship is a sheltering tree;
Oh the joys that came down shower-like,
Of friendship, love, and liberty,
Ere I was old!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#26. Old trees in their living state are the only things that money cannot command.
Walter Savage Landor
#27. Broad-streeted Richmond ... The trees in the streets are old trees used to living with people, Family trees that remember your grandfather's name.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#28. Loving you is like being ten years old again, scaling a tree with my eyes bright and skyward, wanting only to get higher and higher, without a thought of how I would get back down.
Lang Leav
#29. Yeti. Big Foot. There was some old creature his grandmother had told him about. The Green Man. Half man, half tree. This was him. Beauvoir gripped his stick.
Louise Penny
#30. When I behold the heavens as in their prime,
And then the earth (though old) still clad in green,
The stones and trees, insensible of time,
Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen
Anne Bradstreet
#31. The Japanese think it strange we paint our old wooden houses when it takes so long to find the wabi in them. They prefer the bonsai tree after the valiant blossoming is over, the leaves fallen. When bareness reveals a merit born in the vegetable struggling.
Jack Gilbert
#33. According to my dermatologist, the neck starts to go at forty-three, and that's that ... The neck is a dead give-away. Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth. You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn't have to if it had a neck.
Nora Ephron
#34. I can see myself as a very old man in a terrific wheelchair. Only, I won't be photographing the tree outside my window, the way Steichen did. I'll be photographing other old people.
Richard Avedon
#35. In a time of disorder [Laertes] has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree. (pg. 123, The Body and the Earth)
Wendell Berry
#36. The roots of the aged palm tree exceed those of the young one; the old have a greater attachment to the world.
Saib Tabrizi
#37. A sapling must be hedged about for protection, but when it becomes a tree, a hedge would be a hindrance. So there is no need to criticise and condemn the old forms.
Swami Vivekananda
#38. The witch was as old as the mulberry tree
She lived in the house of a hundred clocks
She sold storms and sorrows and calmed the sea
And she kept her life in a box.
Neil Gaiman
#39. I thought of my father's wisdom, as though it were buried in a box under a tree. As in the old song - a gold box with a silver pin. Some day I should be grown up, and I should dig up the box and turn the pin.
Mary Butts
#41. Stars. Trees breathe in starlight year after year, and it goes deep into their bones. So when you cut a tree open, you smell a hundred years' worth of light. Ancient starlight that took millions of years to reach earth. That's why trees smell so beautiful and old.
Frances O'Roark Dowell
#42. Marya watched from the upper floor as once again the birds gathered in the great oak tree, sniping and snapping for the last autumn nuts, stolen from squirrels and hidden in bark-cracks, which every winged creature knows are the most bitter of all nuts, like old sorrows sitting heavy on the tongue.
Catherynne M Valente
#43. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. 'Stop!' cried the groaning old man at last, 'Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.
Gertrude Stein
#44. George Oppen is a tough old bird. If you've never seen what [he] sees, it's because you haven't sat still long enough and looked as he has. The things he sees feel like the gnarled bark of a tree. The tree is there too. You can put your weight against it. It won't give.
Carl Rakosi
#45. Cut yourself some slack. Remember, one hundred years from now, all new people. - Message tacked to a tree by monks at Wat Umong, a 700-year-old temple in Thailand
Jenny Blake
#46. It is also to be noticed, that the old man is distinguished by his works, as a tree is by its fruits.
John Calvin
#47. I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
Henry David Thoreau
#48. The river was slow here, our old Cherwell, but kitted out with treacherous tree roots and crumbling banks, and just enough depth to scare one toward salvation.
Gregory Maguire
#49. I think of myself as an actor. The duty of an actor is to be able to impersonate anything - a child, an old man, a tree, a chair, a woman.
Barry Humphries
#51. Gigantic second and third growth trees are found in the redwoods, forming magnificent temple-like circles around charred ruins more than a thousand years old.
John Muir
#52. My mom allowed me to take an old burlap bag and fill it with moss, corn stalks and rocks, then hang it from a tree and spend an hour a day punching my heavy bag.
Joe Frazier
#53. A child's fingernails should never be cut in the first year. The mother must bite them off or he'll become a thief. But when they are first cut at a year old, they must be buried under an ash tree so that witches can't take them and cause the child harm. Lincoln
Karen Maitland
#54. To be gripped by Foteini's calloused, rustic hand felt like being lovingly embraced by a 1,000 year old olive tree. For the first time since I arrived I felt the outer layer of my foreignness begin to peel away, just a tiny bit.
Marjory McGinn
#55. The troubles of the young are soon over; they leave no external mark. If you wound the tree in its youth the bark will quickly cover the gash; but when the tree is very old, peeling the bark off, and looking carefully, you will see the scar there still. All that is buried is not dead.
Olive Schreiner
#56. I fell in love with the land and with the very old fashioned idea of leaving a physical legacy for my children. A stunning place, with a magnificent forest of trees, and a magnificent river.
Val Kilmer
#57. The bones of the oak tree that had stood by the spring branch during my youth were scattered about the ground, pieces of the skeleton of a majestic life that had passed while I was off growing up and old.
Dan Groat
#58. I have never as yet gone a step to see a literary lion; but I would go a considerable way to see Emerson, this pioneer in the moral forests of the New World, who applies his axe to the roots of the old trees to hew them down and to open the paths for new planting.
Fredrika Bremer
#59. Come forth, old man,
thy daughter's side
Is now the fitting place for thee:
When time has quell'd the oak's bold pride,
The youthful tendril yet may hide,
The ruins of the parent tree.
Walter Scott
#60. A king of a kingdom no one fucking knows about! I'm the tree in the forest that silently falls
when no one is around to be crushed! [Lothaire, Enemy of Old]
Kresley Cole
#61. Years should be nothing to you. Who asked you to count them or consider them? In the world of wild Nature, time is measured by seasons only-the bird does not know how old it is-the rose-tree does not count its birthdays!
Marie Corelli
#62. I resemble the poplar,
that tree which, even when old, still looks young.
Joseph Joubert
#63. He was not merely a chip off the old block, but the old block itself.
Edmund Burke
#64. Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.
Jill Lepore
#65. I like old people, just as I like old trees: in their shadow there is freshness and peace, one admires them, and around them everything is so calm.
Svetlana Alliluyeva
#66. And books! ... she would buy them all over and over again; she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree.
Jane Austen
#67. God is a sort of burglar. As a young man you knock him down; as an old man you try to conciliate him, because he may knock you down.
Herbert Beerbohm Tree
#68. Old pear tree starlings announce harvest time
Phil Noble
#69. Claire lifted her glass after everyone had eaten. "Everyone make a toast. To food and flowers," she said.
"To love and laughter," Tyler said.
"To old and new," Henry said.
"To what's next," Evanelle said.
"To the apple tree," Bay said.
Sarah Addison Allen
#70. While on that old grey stone I sat
Under the old wind-broken tree,
I knew that One is animate,
Mankind inanimate phantasy.
William Butler Yeats
#71. Old is the tree and the fruit good,
Very old and thick the wood.
Woodman, is your courage stout?
Beware! the root is wrapped about
Your mother's heart, your father's bones;
And like the mandrake comes with groans.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#72. A pear tree is blooming, by a collapsed house, on an old battlefield.
Masaoka Shiki
#73. I wish I could look back and say that I have learned to love as much as I loved to learn. But if I like, there could be a cauldron boiling for me in hell tomorrow, and who can assure me tomorrow is not already on my doorstep, now that I am as old as an oak tree, and still not consigned to the grave?
Elif Shafak
#74. These palm trees like my old homeboys, hella shady
Chamillionaire
#75. It cuts one sadly to see the grief of old people; they've no way o' working it off; and the new spring brings no new shoots out on the withered tree.
George Eliot
#77. Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree.
Terry Teachout
#78. Son, do you know how love should be begun?"
The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The old man leaned closer and whispered:
"A tree. A rock. A cloud.
Carson McCullers
#79. We live, we die, and like the grass and trees, renew ourselves from the soft earth of the grave. Stones crumble and decay, faiths grow old and they are forgotten, but new beliefs are born. The faith of the villages is dust now ... but it will grow again ... like the trees.
Chief Joseph
#80. Lao Tsu uses the anology of the tree. The old hard tree breaks and falls when the wind blows. The young tree bends and does not break. He advises us to bend and not to break.
Frederick Lenz
#81. A wise old owl once told me,
One time when he was out of his tree,
That nothing in this world is for free.
I agree!
P.D. Cain
#84. Someone is dead.
Even the trees know it,
those poor old dancers who come on lewdly,
all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.
Anne Sexton
#85. Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.
Mark Twain
#86. I feel most emphatically that we should not turn into shingles a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conqueror penetrated to the valley of the Euphrates.
Theodore Roosevelt
#87. The strength of a tree, the old ones say, comes not from growing thicker in the good years when there is water, but from staying alive in the bad, dry times.
Joseph M. Marshall III
#88. When a chainsaw rips into a 2,000 year old redwood tree, it's ripping into my guts. When a bulldozer plows through the Amazon rainforest, it's ripping through my side. And when a Japanese whaling ship fires an exploding harpoon into a great whale it's my heart that's being blown to smithereens.
David Foreman
#89. If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree which grows from a ledge of naked sandstone near the old entrance to Arches National Monument.
Edward Abbey
#90. Ours is only a little power, seems like, next to theirs," Moss said. "But it goes down deep. It's all roots. It's like an old blackberry thicket. And a wizard's power's like a fir tree, maybe, great and tall and grand, but it'll blow right down in a storm. Nothing kills a blackberry bramble.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#91. Jean-Louis had never had a day's illness in his life. He was tall and as gnarled as an oak. The sun had baked his skin until it had the colour and toughness and stillness of a tree. With advancing years, he had lost his tongue. He now never spoke, considering such an activity pointless.
Emile Zola
#92. When the old plum tree blooms, the entire world blooms.
Dogen
#93. It may be worth noticing as a curious circumstance, when persons past forty before they were at all acquainted form together a very close intimacy of friendship. For grafts of old wood to take, there must be a wonderful congeniality between the trees.
Richard Whately
#94. Once, when she was six years old, she had fallen from a tree, flat on her stomach. She could still recall that sickening interval before breath came back into her body. Now, as she looked at him, she felt the same way she had felt then, breathless, stunned, nauseated.
Margaret Mitchell
#95. Like an inspired and prolific poet, who never refuses to spread beauty to the humblest places, which until now did not seem to share the domain of art, the sun still warmed the bountiful energy of the dung heap, of the unevenly paved yard, and of the pear tree worn down like an old serving maid.
Marcel Proust
#96. Who's this - alone with stone and sky? It's only my old dog and I - It's only him; it's only me; Alone with stone and grass and tree. What share we most - we two together? Smells, and awareness of the weather. What is it makes us more than dust? My trust in him; in me his trust.
Siegfried Sassoon
#97. Wisdom can see the red, the rose, the stained and sculptured curve of grey, the charcoal scars of fire, and see around that living tower of tree the hermit tatters of old bark split down and strip to end the season; and can be quiet and not look for reasons past the edge of reason.
Judith Wright
#98. I can pass days
Stretch'd in the shade of those old cedar trees,
Watching the sunshine like a blessing fall,
The breeze like music wandering o'er the boughs,
Each tree a natural harp,
each different leaf
A different note, blent in one vast thanksgiving.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
#99. Tiny waterfalls trickle down over the rocks where they freeze and the ice glitters in the sunlight reflected off rock and snow. It is said that in the old times, when the early loggers came, the first tree cut down could not fall because the forest was so dense there was no place for it to land.
Kathleen Valentine
#100. Then here 's to the oak, the brave old oak, Who stands in his pride alone! And still flourish he a hale green tree When a hundred years are gone!
Henry Chorley
