Motivational and Inspirational Quotes and Sayings

Quoting from The Company of Trees by Joseph Jastrab:

I find myself walking the same wooded trails over and over again. This allows me frequent visits with a few trees with whom I've become closely acquainted. I watch how they handle themselves in the wind, admire their steadfast grounding in the earth, the strength and flexibility of trunk and limb. Through it all, they stand. They invite me to do likewise. I waver. I want "to keep my options open." I can imagine no envy in them for my ability to wander across the earth in search of my place. None whom I've met have given me the slightest inclination that they would trade places with me. That's the thing about trees, they don't trade places. They belong.

They live forever at home. Their commitment to the dark earth they stand on roots them into something eternal. No, they watch me wander, but do not lose themselves in the watching.

Buried in the origins of our language, I find an ancient reflection of my feeling for these trees. The word "true" and the word "tree" have sprouted from the same Germanic root. This gives me hope. What we recognize in the life of another is always something that lives inside us – something waiting to be seen and claimed by our own eyes.

Strands of hemlock have offered a particularly warm invitation to be among them. The silence they generate is perceptibly different than that of a stand of oak or maple or even their close cousin pine. I cannot continue walking through a hemlock grove without pausing for a moment. My eyes are attracted to the way their lacy layers of needled branches disperse the light, scattering the ground with drifts of sunlight. Their straight trunk and furrowed bark embody a simple dignity they are not ashamed to hide.

My ears relax into the soft drone of their branches at play with the wind. But it's something else that brings me to a standstill – something so refined and spacious about these beings. They have the power to absorb my busy mind. They leave me mindless.

[Read more from Joseph Jastrab at The Hero's Journey Programs website.]

Mr. Jastrab's essay struck a resonant chord in me, as I have had similar relationships with trees, on an individual basis, and with groups and types of trees. Mr. Jastrab expressed my feelings about it almost exactly.

On his note about the roots of the words "tree" and "truth," according to Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary 10th Edition (1995), the history of "true" reads like this:

Middle English "trewe," from Old English "treowe" (faithful); akin to Old High German "gitriuwi" (faithful), Old Irish "derb" (sure), and probably Sanskrit "daruna" (hard), "daru" (wood).

For "tree" they offer this etymology:

Middle English, from Old English "treow;" akin to Old Norse "tre" (tree), Greek "drys," Sanskrit "daru" (wood)

No surprise then, that so many wisdom traditions venerate trees, or find inspiration in meditations and contemplations upon them, or develop wisdom analogies and parables related to them. This may give a whole new sense to the Pagan origin of our modern tradition of Christmas trees.

Some samples of "tree truth" ...

Larger and finer meanings are read into the older legends of the plants, and the universality of certain myths is expressed in the concurrence of ideas in the beginnings of the great religions. One of the first figures in the leading cosmologies is a tree of life guarded by a serpent. In the Judaic faith this was the tree in the garden of Eden; the Scandinavians made it an ash, Ygdrasil; Christians usually specify the tree as an apple, Hindus as a soma, Persians as a homa, Cambodians as a talok; this early treee is the vine of Bacchus, the snake-entwined caduceus of Mercury, the twining creeper of the Eddas, the bohidruma of Buddha, the fig of Isaiah, the tree of Aesculapius with the serpent around his trunk.
-- Charles M. Skinner, Myths and Legends of Flowers, Trees, Fruits and Plants, 1911

For he will be like a tree planted by the water,
That extends its roots by a stream
And will not fear when the heat comes;
But its leaves will be green,
And it will not be anxious in a year of drought
Nor cease to yield fruit.
-- Jeremiah 17:8

Then I thought, "I shall die in my nest,
And I shall multiply {my} days as the sand.
My root is spread out to the waters,
And dew lies all night on my branch.
My glory is {ever} new with me,
And my bow is renewed in my hand."
-- Job 29:18-25

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
-- John Muir

Dear friend, all theory is gray,
And green the golden tree of life.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in Faust

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
-- William Shakespeare, in As You Like It

The method of Plum Village is that whenever we look at a tree, which is swaying around in the wind, we should not be too attentive to the top of the tree. Bring your eyes down to the trunk of the tree, and you feel more secure. Because when we look at the trunk of the tree, we see that it is being held by roots which go down very deep; it is very solid. And we feel differently; we feel the tree will be all right. But if we look up at the branches, we feel that they can be broken at any time.

Our person is the same as far as our body and our mind -- we have roots going down deep. If we just look at our emotions, we feel very feeble, frail. But if we can come back to our roots, we will no longer be the victims of the storm. This solid part of our body is below our navel. When we feel a very strong emotion, we shouldn’t dwell in the area of our brain or our heart. We should not sway around in our thinking or our feeling. W hen we have a strong emotion, we should bring our attention down below our navel and dwell in that place. We should breathe in and breathe out, being aware of the rising and falling of our abdomen. Sitting, we are aware of our abdomen rising. Sitting, we are aware of our abdomen falling. We practice like this because the abdomen is the root of our body. At the same time, it is the root of our mind. The root of our mind is not the mind consciousness, but the deeper levels of the store consciousness.

So we should not allow this feeling to blow us around from on top. Instead we should come down to the trunk of our being, which is lower down. If we know how to sit solidly for 15 minutes, breathing in and out, and being aware of the rising and falling of the abdomen, that emotion will pass. We will be able to live again. We will smile and be able to say, "It was just a storm. And I was skilful in that storm, I was able to return to my root."

-- from a Dharma Talk given by Thich Nhat Hanh on February 19, 1998, in Plum Village, France.
The Sutra on the Four Establishments of Mindfulness - Mindfulness Of Body and Feelings

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.
-- William Blake, 1799, The Letters

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 (1817-1862)

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?

-- Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, "Ah!"
-- Joseph Campbell

Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.
-- Chinese proverb

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
-- Willa Cather (1873-1947), O Pioneers, 1913

Sometimes Thou may'st walk in Groves,
which being full of Majestie will much advance the Soul.
-- Thomas Vaughan, Anima Magica Abscondita

The groves were God's first temples.
-- William Cullen Bryant, A Forest Hymn

A tree falls the way it leans.
-- Bulgarian Proverb

And see the peaceful trees extend
their myriad leaves in leisured dance—
they bear the weight of sky and cloud
upon the fountain of their veins.
-- Kathleen Raine, Envoi

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

He that planteth a tree is a servant of God, he
provideth a kindness for many generations, and
faces that he hath not seen shall bless him.
-- Henry Van Dyke

Life without love is like a tree without blossom and fruit.
-- Khalil Gibran

When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?
-- Seneca

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the ages can.
-- William Wordsworth, in The Tables Turned

That each day I may walk unceasingly on the banks of my water, that my soul may repose on the branches of the trees which I planted, that I may refresh myself under the shadow of my sycomore.
-- Egyptian tomb inscription, circa 1400 BCE
(Sycamore trees were held to be sacred in ancient Egypt and are the first trees represented in ancient art.)

Because they are primeval, because they outlive us, because they are fixed, trees seem to emanate a sense of permanence. And though rooted in earth, they seem to touch the sky. For these reasons it is natural to feel we might learn wisdom from them, to haunt about them with the idea that if we could only read their silent riddle rightly we should learn some secret vital to our own lives; or even, more specifically, some secret vital to our real, our lasting and spiritual existence.
-- Kim Taplin, Tongues in Trees, 1989, p. 14.

The oldest living thing known in the world is a tree. It is a Bristlecone Pine known as "Methuselah," in the White Mountains on the California-Nevada border, at an elevation of over 10,000 feet. With a trunk over 4 feet wide, and height of about 55 feet, it is estimated to be more than 4,700 years old. There was one a few hundred years older, but someone cut it down to see how old it was! See the PBS website for their program on the Methuselah Tree.

- The Balsamean