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“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
― Herman Hesse, Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
― John Muir

“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.”
― Chris Maser, Forest Primeval: The Natural History of an Ancient Forest

“The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil - rich, fertile soil.
She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.
She could plant a forest inside herself.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Forests may be gorgeous but there is nothing more alive than a tree that learns how to grow in a cemetery.”
― Andrea Gibson

“I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.”
― Gustave Flaubert, November

“All forests have their own personality. I don't just mean the obvious differences, like how an English woodland is different from a Central American rain forest, or comparing tracts of West Coast redwoods to the saguaro forests of the American Southwest... they each have their own gossip, their own sound, their own rustling whispers and smells. A voice speaks up when you enter their acres that can't be mistaken for one you'd hear anyplace else, a voice true to those particular tress, individual rather than of their species.”
― Charles de Lint, The Onion Girl

“What an irony it is that these living beings whose shade we sit in,
whose fruit we eat, whose limbs we climb, whose roots we water, to
whom most of us rarely give a second thought, are so poorly
understood. We need to come, as soon as possible, to a profound
understanding and appreciation for trees and forests and the vital
role they play, for they are among our best allies in the uncertain
future that is unfolding.”
― Jim Robbins, The Man Who Planted Trees: Lost Groves, Champion Trees, and an Urgent Plan to Save the Planet

“The world has a very serious problem, my friend' Shiva went on. 'Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich -- like me -- live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we're pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though...”
― Ramez Naam, Crux

“The forest has shrunk
And fear has expanded,
The forests have dwindled,
There are less animals now,
less courage and less lightning,
less beauty
and the moon lies bare,
deflowered by force and
then abandoned.”
― Visar Zhiti, The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry

“If you go to a desert, you will hear this mysterious voice: Be wise, protect your forests!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“It was the forest’s fault. Those two handsome woodcutters. An evil place, the forest, everyone knew it, full of temptations and imps...”
― Tanith Lee

“An English wood is like a good many other things in life-- very promising at a distance, but a hollow mockery when you get within. You see daylight on both sides, and the sun freckles the very bracken. Our woods need the night to make them seem what they ought to be--what they once were, before our ancestors' descendants demanded so much more money, in these so much more various days. ("The Striding Place")”
― Gertrude Atherton, The Bell in the Fog & Other Stories

“Trees are the ambassadors of patience.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya

“Nature is the main protagonist in my book, not the people. Nature is also the main protagonist in our lives. It is largely unrepresented and voiceless. Until it screams. Then we have to pay attention.”
― Sadie Noni

“All the poetry is going from Nature,' he cried, 'her lakes and marshes are drained, her seas banked up, her forests cut down. Everywhere we see the vulgarity of desolation spreading.”
― E.M. Forster , Collected Short Stories

“But what is the price of doing nothing, Guardian? And who bears it? You are a part of the whole, are you not? Like the trees, the orangutans, the tigers…Do not underestimate your power. You influence more than you think.”
― Sadie Noni, The Fires of Tanam Alkin

“Last night, I had a dream that the forest split in two.”
― Kel Byron, A Lonely Broadcast: Book One

“I wish I could explain why things were like this, why they had always been like this. Unfortunately, solving mysteries of the unknown was a bit above my pay grade. The most I could do was keep people out of the woods, keep a gun pointed at the tree line, and occasionally join the rangers on ‘forest duty��.”
― Kel Byron, A Lonely Broadcast: Book One

“The forests, oceans, rivers, mountains, caves, and stars are the only temples you will need.”
― Leo Lourdes, A World of Yoga: 700 Asanas for Mindfulness and Well-Being

“The world was a different place once. People didn’t own forests when I was a girl. Forests simply were. We witches could drift from place to place, from wood to wood, weaving cottages from magic and whatever bits of the forest were handy��”
― Heather Fawcett, The Grace of Wild Things

“Chidren wish for a world pristine,
poets, to think, need a sheet that is clean,
clean, if, the sky, means the weather is good,
clear water - a mirror, reflects, like it should,
clear thoughts make for a clearer mind,
clean must be every creature, in kind,
over every forest, the air is clean,
every tree has its own dream��”
― Will Advise, На чист Български...: Pristine Bulgarian sayings...

“Always - an eternal road��
Always ours is the world��
Always always is a new road��
Always is for love a word��
Always forests will be calm��
Always hearts will love - a psalm��
Always they will run - hearts never stop��
Always the eternal mountain path they top��”
― Will Advise, На чист Български...: Pristine Bulgarian sayings...

“How I long
to go wandering
through the forest,
like a river stream
past bamboo groves
and paths lined with blossoms,
flowing with the wind
carrying echos of birdsongs
across mountains,
radiant with sun beams
sparkling in the spring afternoon.”
― Meeta Ahluwalia

“For all our needs, it provides,
how would the earth forgive
all we take so ungraciously,
to fill our pockets,
digging & drilling into its rich core, grand mountains, and vast seas so impudently,
it's centuries old lush, dense forests diminishing, thawing glaciers.
It's pristine ocean & rivers now carry waste & muck,
the smoke, dust & billions cars that turn the azure sky gray.
It's groans and trembling man cannot bear;
greedily,
audaciously turns his gaze up to the heavens, to the moon,
and other planets to plunder,
trash & devastate in the name of ambition, progress and development!”
― Meeta Ahluwalia

“To what end do the trees of a virgin forest contend with each other? "For happiness"? - For power! ...”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Vols 1-2

“In the heart of the forest, every step is a dream, every breath a prayer, every glance a discovery.”
― David Passarelli, Mountain poems: Musings on stone, forest, and snow

“Santa Cruz was the safest place on Earth I could imagine: my sweet hometown, where the forests kissed the beaches on foggy mornings and their tender whispers liked you to sleep at night”
― Manjula Martin, The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History

“The forests that in October threw hallucinogenic confetti at the world now withdrawn, bereft , composed, and suddenly much thinner, looking like old people who know their time has just about come.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“Were they any more lonely the silken ladies peering through those slits, than the Renée and the Frannçoise of today, with the clammy water damping the mouldering walls, and the forest, thick and shaggy, shrouding the very door ? Did the wild boar, fiery-eyed, come rooting where the cattle wandered now and the thin horn of the huntsman sound in early morning when the mist still clung about the trees ?”
― Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat