Arboreal Quotes & Sayings

Beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal. — Ellen Glasgow

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits. — Charles Darwin

MONKEY, n. An arboreal animal which makes itself at home in genealogical trees. — Ambrose Bierce

Darwin's Ark
The fact is, I know those ancestors
floating through my sleep:
an animal that breathed water,
had a great swimming tail,
an imperfect skull, undoubtedly
hermaphrodite ... I slide
through all the oceans with these kin,
salt water pulsing in my veins,
and aeons follow me into the trees:
a hairy, tailed quadruped,
arboreal in its habits, scales
slipping off my flanks ...
I have sailed the ancients seas to come
to the bones of Megatherium ...
The thing I want to father most
is the rarest, most difficult thing of all.
Though knee-deep in these rivers of innocent blood,
I want to be - a decent animal. — Philip Appleman

WEATHER, n. The climate of an hour. A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The setting up of official weather bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove that even governments are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of the jungle. — Ambrose Bierce

If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, then children are somewhat closer to our roots as primates in the arboreal forest. Humans appear to be the only primates that I know of that are afraid of heights. All other primates, when they're scared, they run up a tree, where they feel safe. — Richard Preston

Its composure thoroughly disrupted, the little treelet, the picture of arboreal distress, let its branches droop a little, and its green birch leaves fluttered anxiously. — Lev Grossman

I was glad I'd remembered to shucksify my vocabulary in the company of children. — Sam Lipsyte

Many scientists (the most notable being Albert Einstein) think in visual, spatial, and physical images rather than in mathematical terms and words. (N.B.: That the theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, used an arboreal term to picture the cosmos [i.e., affirming that the universe "could have different branches,"] is a tribute to his [very visual] primate brain.) — David B. Givens

Whatever you're going through in your life, don't ever give up. — Mariah Carey

Arboreal, a fine word. Our arboreal ancestors, Crake used to say. Used to shit on their enemies from above while perched in trees. All planes and rockets and bombs are simply elaborations on that primate instinct. — Margaret Atwood

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Our ape-like and arboreal ancestors entered upon the first of many short cuts. To crack a marrow-bone with a rock was the act which fathered the tool, and between the cracking of a marrow-bone and the riding down town in an automobile lies only a difference of degree. — Jack London

Democrats are going to proudly run on the fact that we turned the economy around. It was our policies under President Obama's leadership through the Recovery Act, through investing in the automobile industry. — Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Later, in a different home, I befriended a eucalypt, using a resilient bough as a trampoline. Learning nothing from having plummeted from the peppercorn, I'd bounce happily in my haven in the heavens. I loved that tree - and fully understand why Heysen, Roberts, McCubbin and the rest devoted so much time and effort to painting arboreal portraits. — Phillip Adams

Do jungle animals understand the true nature of the trees among which they have their daily being? In the parent-forest, amid those mighty trunks, we shelter and play; but whether the trees are healthy or corroded, whether they harbour demons or good spirites, we cannot say. Nor do we know the greatest secret of all: that one day we, too, will become as arboreal as they. And the trees, whose leaves we eat, whose bark we gnaw, remember sadly that they were animals once, they climbed like squirrels and bounded like deer, until one day they paused, and their legs grew down into the earth and stuck there, spreading, and vegetation sprouted from their swaying heads. They remember this as a fact; but the lived reality of their fauna years, the how-it-felt of that chaotic freedom is beyond recapture. They remember it as a rustle in their leaves. — Salman Rushdie

Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes; perhaps they will attain to a woman's tenderness. — E. M. Forster

We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World. — Charles Darwin

The "hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and, pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits," this good fellow carried hidden in his nature, apparently, something destined to develop into a necessity for humane letters. — Matthew Arnold

Let the advocate of animal food, force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth, and plunging his head into its vitals, slake his thirst with the steaming blood; when fresh from the deed of horror let him revert to the irresistible instincts of nature that would rise in judgment against it, and say, Nature formed me for such work as this. Then, and then only, would he be consistent. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The woods were full of sound: the stream between the rocks, the wind among the needles of the pine branches, the chitter of insects and the cries of small arboreal mammals, as well as the birdsong; and from time to time a stronger gust of wind would make one of the branches of a cedar or a fir move against another and groan like a cello. It — Philip Pullman