Trees rock. And apparently I’m not alone in this assessment of our green, leafy BFFs–here are some pro-tree quotes I’ve gathered in honor of Arbor Day 2010 (April 30th). (I culled some from ArborDay.org)

Also, here’s a post I did a while back, How to Talk to a Tree (which garnered FL’s most vociferous comments ever. What’s up with that?).

 

 

 Inspiring Tree Quotes

“I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.  They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!” – John Muir

“The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb

“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.” – Hermann Hesse, Wandering

“What did the tree learn from the earth to be able to talk with the sky?” – Pablo Neruda

“I am the Lorax! I speak for the trees,
Which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please;
But I also speak for the brown Barbaloots,
Who frolicked and played in their Barbaloot suits,
Happily eating Truffula fruits.
Now, since you’ve chopped the trees to the ground
There’s not enough Truffula fruit to go ’round!
And my poor Barbaloots are all feeling the crummies
Because they have gas, and no food, in their tummies.” – Dr. Seuss

“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Alone with myself
The trees bend to caress me
The shade hugs my heart” – Candy Polgar

“Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.”- Bill Vaughan

“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

“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”- Warren Buffett

“The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”- Greek Proverb

“It is well that you should celebrate your Arbor Day thoughtfully, for within your lifetime the nation’s need of trees will become serious. We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted.” – Theodore Roosevelt, 1907 Arbor Day Message

“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.”- Mahatma Gandhi

“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.” – Kahlil Gibran

“A tree is beautiful, but what’s more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees.” – Anton Chekhov

As the poet said, “only God can make a tree” — probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.  – Woody Allen

[Image via: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Emirgan_04589.jpg]