Before a dream is realized, the Soul of the World tests everything that was learned along the way. It does this not because it is evil, but so that we can, in addition to realizing our dreams, master the lessons we’ve learned as we’ve moved toward that dream. That’s the point at which most people give up. It’s the point at which, as we say in the language of the desert, one 'dies of thirst just when the palm trees have appeared on the horizon.
- Paulo Coelho
We'll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
'The other or eastern end of the isle was whelmed in the blackest shade. A sombre, yet beautiful and peaceful gloom here pervaded all things. The trees were dark in color, and mournful in form and attitude, wreathing themselves into sad, solemn, and spectral shapes that conveyed ideas of mortal sorrow and untimely death. The grass wore the deep tint of the cypress, and the heads of its blades hung droopingly, and hither and thither among it were many small unsightly hillocks, low and narrow, and not very long, that had the aspect of graves, but were not; although over and all about them the rue and the rosemary clambered. The shade of the trees fell heavily upon the water, and seemed to bury itself therein, impregnating the depths of the element with darkness. I fancied that each shadow, as the sun descended lower and lower, separated itself sullenly from the trunk that gave it birth, and thus became absorbed by the stream; while other shadows issued momently from the trees, taking the place of their predecessors thus entombed.'
- Edgar Allan Poe, The Island of the Fay
“There are quiet places also in the mind,” he said, meditatively. “But we build bandstand and factories on them. Deliberately—to put a stop to the quietness. We don’t like the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupation in my head—round and round continually.” He made a circular motion with his hands. “And the jazz bands, the music hall songs, the boys shouting the news. What’s it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost it isn’t there. Ah, but it is, it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night, sometimes—not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep—the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits, all the fragments of it we’ve been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like this outward quiet of grass and trees.”
– Aldous Huxley
‘Of course, you have to wonder about where the wood came from.
Well, it came from a tree, and the substance of a tree is carbon. Where did that come from? It comes from the air, it’s carbon dioxide from the air. People look at trees and they think they come out of the ground but really trees come out of the air. The carbon dioxide in the air goes into the tree and it changes it; it kicks out the oxygen, pushing the oxygen away from the carbon and leaving the carbon substance with water. (The water comes out of the ground, but how did it get in there? It came out of the air, down from the sky. So in fact most of a tree is out of the air. There’s just a little bit from the ground, some minerals, and so forth.) Now as we know, oxygen and carbonstick very, very tight. How is it that the tree is so smart as to manage to take the carbon dioxide which is the carbon and oxygen so nicely combined, and undo it that easily?” ‘Ah!” you say “life has some mysterious force…” But no – the sun is shining, and it’s the sunlight that comes down and knocks this oxygen away from the carbon, and now the oxygen is some terrible by-product which the tree splits back into the air, leaving the carbon and the water and stuff to make the substance of the the tree.'
- Richard Feynman
“I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.”
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
'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
I stopped short in the path today to admire how the trees grow up without forethought regardless of the time and circumstances. They do not wait as men do—now is the golden age of the sapling—Earth, air, sun, and rain, are occasion enough—.
― The Journal of Henry David Thoreau
