pine trees field near mountain under sunsetPhoto Credit: Sergei Akulich

Welcome to our inspirational quotes collection about trees and forests. We hope they inspire you to care even more about forest conservation and to get out and enjoy the earth's amazing forests even more often. If you like them, please share and link back to us whenever possible.

And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.

--John Muir

Forests should not be walked on, they should be walked under and through.

--Courtney M. Privett

The cultivation of trees is the cultivation of the good, the beautiful and the ennobling in man.

--Julius Sterling Morton

We are of the forest and of magi, and we have always been.

--Meagan Spooner

Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.

--John Muir

Forests are like churches, hallowed places. There's a stillness about them, a sort of reverence.

--Sabrina Elkins

Trees are worth more alive than dead.

--Prince

If love was a tree
I'd plant you a forest.

--Dahi Tamara Koch

What a noble gift to man are the Forests! What a debt of gratitude and admiration we owe to their beauty and their utility! How pleasantly the shadows of the wood fall upon our heads when we turn from the glitter and turmoil of the world of man!

--Susan Fenimore Cooper

Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.

--Alfred North Whitehead

Love is the sap of the tree of Life.

--Banani Ray

Destroying a tropical rainforest for profit is like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner.

--Edward O. Wilson

And the forest perfume — trees and earth — it's like incense in a shrine. You fall into a state of... prayer.

--Keiichi Sigsawa

Those who plant trees plant hope.

--Lucy Larcom

An Oak tree is a daily reminder that great things often have small beginnings.

--Matshona Dhliwayo

Can you feel the connection? We breathe so that the trees thrive and the trees breathe so that we are able to live. Perfect symbiosis.

--Sanchita Pandey

I know there is pain when sawmills close and people lose jobs, but we have to make a choice. We need water and we need these forests.

--Wangari Maathai

The groves were God's first temples.

--William Cullen Bryant

I am convinced that most Americans of the new generation have no idea what a decent forest looks like. The only way to tell them is to show them.

--Aldo Leopold

Whosoever plants a tree, Winks at immortality.

--Felix Dennis

The only investable idea I have real confidence in is farming and forestry. My family owns some forest, and now we're closing on a farm. Make the farming more sustainable and the forestry more sustainable, and everyone benefits.

--Jeremy Grantham

If you have forest, if you have green forest, the water table goes up. What happens with deforestation is the water level goes down and we all know how much importance drinking water has.

--Mahendra Singh Dhoni

My favourite places on earth are the wild waterways where the forest opens its arms and a silver curve of river folds the traveller into its embrace.

--Rory MacLean

We lose our souls if we lose the experience of the forest, the butterflies, the song of the birds, if we can't see the stars at night.

--Thomas Berry

The improvement of forest trees is the work of centuries. So much more the reason for beginning now.

--George Perkins Marsh


Your body's made to run, to walk, to trek long distances and carry things, work in a forest, and hunt animals. You have to keep it alive to function.

--Dolph Lundgren

Trees exhale for us so that we can inhale them to stay alive. Can we ever forget that? Let us love trees with every breath we take until we perish.

--Munia Khan

How humans love plundering a forest, like spoiled children with their parents' ATM cards and no concept of moderation.

--Paul Rosolie

The trees were dappling again. They loved to dapple, it seemed to be their favorite pastime.

--Millie Florence

Whenever there is a breeze in the old forest, you might, for a moment, realize that the trees are singing. There, on the wind, are the voices of sugarberry and juniper and maple.

--Kathi Appelt

Longer Version:

Whenever there is a breeze in the old forest, you might, for a moment, realize that the trees are singing. There, on the wind, are the voices of sugarberry and juniper and maple...


When humans experience something as powerful as a forest or a rainbow, it is not crazy to assign its existence to a Greater Intelligence.

--Anne Lamott

Few people know that trees in the Amazon put more water into the sky, in the form of steam, than the Amazon River transports to sea. We really need to take care of forests: they are an incredible value to all of us!

--Yana Marull

It would seem from this fact, that man is naturally a wild animal, and that when taken from the woods, he is never happy in his natural state, 'till he returns to them again.

--Benjamin Rush

Every forest branch moves differently in the breeze,
but as they sway they connect at the roots.

--Rumi

Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity, perhaps ever. Global temperatures are rising at an unprecedented rate, causing drought and forest fires and impacting human health.

--Cary Kennedy

The forest has always been a place, in fairy tales and in Shakespeare, where you go and discover who you are. You get stripped of everything you thought you were, some type of ordeal takes place, and you come out stronger.

--David Farr

Gold is a luxury. Trees are necessities. Man can live and thrive without gold, but we cannot survive without trees.

--Paul Bamikole

The death of the forest is the end of our life.

--Dorothy Stang

If man doesn't learn to treat the oceans and the rain forest with respect, man will become extinct.

--Peter Benchley

It's hard to appreciate the importance of the rainforest because it seems so far away, but it's vital to the survival of the planet as we know it.

--Lily Cole

Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed.

--Julius Sterling Morton

I'm always astonished by a forest. It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.

--Gunter Grass

Most people know that forests are the lungs of our planet, literally playing a critical role in every breath we take. And that they're also home to incredible animals like the orangutan and elephant, which will go extinct if we keep cutting down their forests.

--Chris Noth

Maintaining healthy forests is essential to those who make a living from the land and for those of us who use them for recreational purposes.

--Cathy McMorris Rodgers

All things share the same breath -- the beast, the tree, the man... the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.

--Chief Seattle

To really feel a forest canopy one must use different senses, and often the most useful one is the sense of imagination.

--Joan Maloof

Tree cover is a sanctuary from modern life.

--Jessica Marie Baumgartner

Nature should be beside you, not in the fire.

--Steven George Clark

There are rich counsels in the trees.

--Herbert P. Horne

To be without trees would, in the most literal way, to be without our roots.

--Richard Mabey

When you’re outnumbered by trees your perspective shifts.

--Jessica Marie Baumgartner

Trees love to toss and sway; they make such happy noises.

--Emily Carr

When we plant trees, we plant the seeds of peace and seeds of hope.

--Wangari Maathai

Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.

--Khalil Gibran

Longer Version:

Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.


When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.

--Edward O. Wilson

A tree's wood is also its memoir.

--Hope Jahren

If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?

--Douglas Coupland

Like people, trees are all individuals.

--David Hockney

If a tree dies, plant another in its place.

--Carolus Linnaeus

A single tree in the tropical forest in the south of Mexico has more different species than some European countries.

--Carlos Salinas de Gortari

Trees are your best antiques.

--Alexander Smith

A man doesn't plant a tree for himself. He plants it for posterity.

--Alexander Smith

Whenever I see a tree that is climbable, it must be climbed. Sometimes when I'm on a run, I'll just run up a tree, jump on a branch and swing off. My favorite tree, in Saratoga, gets me a good 75 feet up.

--Aaron Patzer

The people are leaving, he says, and the forest is gonna come back and take what's hers.

--Joan Tierney

I was a beach boy, and I believe I learned my songs from the birds of the Brazilian forest.

--Antonio Carlos Jobim

The fallen leaves in the forest seemed to make even the ground glow and burn with light.

--Malcolm Lowry

To be honest with you, the forest resonates with me more, like instinctually, than the sea does.

--Robert Eggers

There's nothing more frightening -- and exciting -- than getting lost in a forest. There is a journey towards the light, and you've got to go through the dark to get to the light. That's what the forest is all about.

--David Farr

A fire in a forest is alive with terror and power.

--Matthew Desmond

I try to be like a forest, revitalizing and constantly growing... Kids would tease me, calling me 'Little Bush.' But... I thought being called Forest helped me find my identity.

--Forest Whitaker

When you go into a forest, anything can happen.

--David Farr

I love the forest. It is the place where you hear yourself better.

--Fahadh Faasil

You can be in terrible shape, and if you take a three-hour walk through the forest and along the river, you're simply not the same as when you started out.

--Jim Harrison

I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.

--Dr. Seuss

We are living on the planet as if we have another one to go to.

--Unknown Author

The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.

--Robert Swan

In the thick of the woods with a carpet of matted needles, the sharp scent of pine, and the fragrant breezes of a winter wind, she was home.

--Katherine McIntyre

For you, it's all about money, money, money. But what about the forests I say? Some of those trees have been there for hundreds of years. What right have you to destroy that?

--Emily Arden

You showed me there is something in the forest to cure most anything that bothers you.

--Donald Smith

Here grew willows and alders, their trunks twisted like giants' sinews. Around them bark lichen bloomed blue-white in the darkness. It felt like a good place, where there was old magic.

--Duncan Harper

Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,
It's the forests where silence has lease;
It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It's the stillness that fills me with peace.

--Robert William Service

All forests are one... They are all echoes of the first forest that gave birth to Mystery when the world began.

--Charles de Lint

The estimated value of the water filtration and storage services provided by the earth's forests is more than $4 trillion a year; as a corollary, for every 10 percent reduction of forest land, the cost of treating drinking water grow by about 20 percent.

--Gary Ferguson

The world's forests are a shared stolen treasure that we must put back for our children's future.

--Desmond Tutu

In a moment the ashes are made, but a forest is a long time growing.

--Seneca the Younger

The interminable forests should become graceful parks, for use and delight.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can't lie in a magical forest! It will ruin all the magic!

--Michael Delaware

I have always been a anti-establishment artist. I once believed, and still do to some extent, that one could get a better education in a forest rather than a desk.

--Casey Carter

If you are lucky you will have the opportunity in your life to be owned by a good piece of land.

--Daniel J. Rice

He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.

--Denis Johnson

These woods are where silence has come to lick its wounds.

--Samantha Hunt
pine trees field near mountain under sunset

Thank you for checking out our selection of quotes on the wonders that are trees and forests! Please consider sharing and also connect with us on social media. Wishing you a wonderful and fortunate day!