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)
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
(Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”)
One generation plants the trees under which another takes its ease.
(Chinese Proverb)
Knowledge is like a baobab tree - one person’s arms are not enough to encompass it. (African proverb)
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