Fall Of A Leaf Quotes & Sayings

A leaf that falls into a stream (or a leaf we intentionally drop into a stream) just where the water disappears into the ground ... will come out again at the next opening, because the underground stream has faithfully carried it there, though during this journey it has been beyond the reach of any outside interference. In the same way, an idea that has been introduced into our minds (or that we ourselves have intentionally introduced) will produce its effects after longer or shorter subconscious development. — Charles Baudouin

That day a dead leaf makes it way into my cell and I pick up, close my fist over it and let the broken pieces fall to the ground. There is no wind to blow it away so I let the fragments surround me like an homage to it's once beautiful life. Here I am with the remnants of the dead and here I sit waiting to crumble into pieces. — Celia Mcmahon

A leaf does not resist the breeze. A goose does not resist the urge to fly down south. Is this not happiness? Is this not freedom? To access this incredible state, we need only one thing: Trust. Trust that, when you are not holding yourself together so tightly, you will not fall apart. Trust that it is more important to fulfill your authentic desires than listen to your fears. Trust that your intuition is leading you somewhere. Trust that the flow of life contains you, is bigger than you, and will take care of you - if you let it. — Vironika Tugaleva

One of the things that makes a dead leaf fall to the ground is the bud of the new leaf that pushes it off the limb. — Jan Karon

Sofia was ice. She was ripples. She was the kind of person who'd sneak into the zoo after hours just to paint an extra spot on a giraffe's neck. She was stubborn. She was lovely. She was the autumn leaf that refused to fall. — Michael Ebner

The leaf of every tree brings a message from the unseen world. Look, every falling leaf is a blessing. — Rumi

Once something has outlived its usefulness in one area of life, its purpose for being in existence is no longer the same. The leaf that captures a stream of sunlight, and then transfers its energy to the tree, serves one purpose in the spring and summer, and another completely different one through the fall and winter. — Guy Finley

Do you like the fall of the year?" The man gave an odd laugh. "Why?" "One of the things that makes a dead leaf fall to the ground is the bud of the new leaf that pushes it off the limb. When you let God fill you with His love and forgiveness, the things you think you desperately want to hold on to start falling away . . . and we hardly notice their passing." The — Jan Karon

Understand me: I wish to be a man from somewhere, a man among men. You see, a slave, when he passes by, weary and surly, carrying a heavy load, limping along and looking down at his feet, only at his feet to avoid falling down; he is in his town, like a leaf in greenery, like a tree in a forest, argos surrounds him, heavy and warm, full of herself; I want to be that slave, Electra, I want to pull the city around me and to roll myself up in it like a blanket. I will not leave. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Water rising under rock
Breaks earth's lock,
Floods thirst roots,
Nurtures sap and trunk and shoots,
Greens and plumps each greedy leaf
Till dappled sunlight like a thief
Sucks leaf-water as I breathe,
Makes of mist an airy wreath
To drift and float and wander high
To the sky,
And fall again,
Sweet, rich rain,
Run under rock and
Rise again. — Anne Eliot Crompton

Behold, when thy face is made bare, he that loved thee shall hate;
Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate
For thy life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain;
And the veil of thine head shall be grief, and the crown shall be pain. — Algernon Charles Swinburne

We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed - begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. First a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I've never mastered it - I only know how true it is; that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life. — Truman Capote

There began to come to her a first dim realization of God's humility. Rejected by the proud in His own right by what humble means He chose to succor them; through the spirit of a child, a poor gypsy or an old man, by a song perhaps, or even it might be by the fall of a leaf or the scent of a flower. For His infinite and humble patience nothing was too small to advance His purpose of salvation and eternity was not too long for its accomplishment. — Elizabeth Goudge

On occasion a traveler will venture from one city to another. Is he perplexed What took seconds in Berne might take hours in Fribourg or days in Lucerne. In the time for a leaf to fall in one place a flower could bloom in another. In the duration of a thunderclap in one place two people could fall in love in another. In the time that a boy grows into a man a drop of rain might slide down a windowpane yet the traveler is unaware of these discrepancies ... If the pace of human desires stay proportionally the same with the motion of waves on a pond how could the traveler know that something has changed — Alan Lightman

Even in the Moment of Our Earliest Kiss

Even in the moment of our earliest kiss,
When sighed the straitened bud into the flower,
Sat the dry seed of most unwelcome this;
And that I knew, though not the day and hour.
Too season-wise am I, being country-bred,
To tilt at autumn or defy the frost:
Snuffing the chill even as my fathers did,
I say with them, "What's out tonight is lost."
I only hoped, with the mild hope of all
Who watch the leaf take shape upon the tree,
A fairer summer and a later fall
Than in these parts a man is apt to see,
And sunny clusters ripened for the wine:
I tell you this across the blackened vine. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night's decay
Ushers in a drearier day. — Emily Bronte

And I wonder how the leaves clinched to the branches, yet to fall, the survivors feel when they see one of their own perish and realise that they too are to share a similar fate, does this thought cause them to give up selflessly, from confinement to independence or does it instil proportions of both courage and fear making them hold on as long as they can and accept what comes after? — Chirag Tulsiani

Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Fall leaves are brilliant with gold and red. You can cup them in your hand and wonder at them, be amazed at their uniqueness and glory. But eventually they are gone, brown, crumbling, scattered on the wind. But the tree remains. The tree is what is important. The tree lives on. That was a difficult knowledge to bear, and an even more difficult life to live. Of course, being the leaf wasn't exactly desirable either. — Rob Thurman

Every experience will fill with immediacy. Because I love this, I am never bored. Beauty constantly wells up like the noise of springwater in my ear. Tree limbs rise and fall like ecstatic arms. Leaf sounds talk together like poets making fresh metaphors. The green felt cover slips; we get a flash of the mirror underneath. The conventional opinion of this poetry is that it shows great optimism for the future. But Father Reason says, No need to announce the future. This now is it. Your deepest need and desire is satisfied by this moment's energy here in your hand. — Rumi

She was so delicate that, while we sat beneath the linden branches, a leaf would fall and drift down and touch her skin, and it would leave a bruise. So as we sat in the afternoon hour, beneath that fragrant linden bower, I had to chase all of the leafs that fell away. — Roman Payne

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped and summer was gone. — A. Bartlett Giamatti

Remember that your tracks are one strand of the web woven endlessly in the hand of god. They're tied to those of the mouse in the field, the eagle on the mountain, the crab in its hold, the lizard beneath its rock. The leaf that falls to the ground a thousand miles away touches your life. The impress of your foot in the soil is felt through a thousand generations. — Daniel Quinn

Occasionally a yellow leaf fell from the tree. Then one or the other of us would turn up his eyes as though to see the leaf fall once again. We didn't wait for the next leaf, which fell a little later. Out eyes lacked the patience. We didn't commit ourselves to leaves. Only to flying splashes of yellow that distracted our faces from one another's — Herta Muller

Have you ever noticed a tree standing naked against the sky, How beautiful it is? All its branches are outlined, and in its nakedness There is a poem, there is a song. Every leaf is gone and it is waiting for the spring. When the spring comes, it again fills the tree with The music of many leaves, Which in due season fall and are blown away. And this is the way of life. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The fundamental principle of morality which we seek as a necessity for thought is not, however, a matter only of arranging and deepening current views of good and evil, but also of expanding and extending these. A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to help all life which he is able to succour, and when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring anything living. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy as valuable in itself, nor how far it is capable of feeling. To him life as such is sacred. He shatters no ice crystal that sparkles in the sun, tears no leaf from its tree, breaks off no flower, and is careful not to crush any insect as he walks. If he works by lamplight on a summer evening, he prefers to keep the window shut and to breathe stifling air, rather than to see insect after insect fall on his table with singed and sinking wings. — Albert Schweitzer

The shadows of leaves fall upon their arms, as they spread the branches apart, but their shoulders are in the sun. The skin of their arms is like a blue mist, but their shoulders are white and glowing, as if the light fell not from above, but rose from under their skin. We watch the leaf which has fallen upon their shoulder and it lies at the curve of their neck, and a drop of dew glistens upon it like a jewel. — Ayn Rand

The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror. — Anais Nin

Since Drake told me that day in the wooded lot,
while the leaves agreed with gravity and left the trees,
that he liked boys instead of girls, it's been easier
to love him. Loving him feels like counting or using
the phone or something else that's effortless. I'm like
a leaf with nothing to do but fall. — Karen Finneyfrock

And there was no longer a single race who bred blindly and without question. Time and its agonizing nostalgia would touch the heart each season, and be seen in the fall of a leaf, or, most terrible of all, a loved face would grow old. Cronos and the Fates had entered man's thinking, and try to escape as he might, he would endure an interior Ice Age. He would make, and then unmake fables. Then at last, and unwillingly, comprehend an intangible abstraction called space-time, and shiver inwardly at the endless abysses of space as he had once shivered, unclothed and unlighted before the Earthly frost. — Loren Eiseley

Beside the grand history of the glaciers and their own, the mountain streams sing the history of every avalanche or earthquake and of snow, all easily recognized by the human ear, and every word evoked by the falling leaf and drinking deer, beside a thousand other facts so small and spoken by the stream in so low a voice the human ear cannot hear them. — John Muir

Tomorrow we will only give them a leaf of the tree of our love, a leaf which will fall on the earth like if it had been made by our lips like a kiss which falls from our invincible heights to show the fire and the tenderness of a true love. — Pablo Neruda

What a simple thing death is, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf. — Vincent Van Gogh

Autumn is a cunning muse who steals by degrees my warmth and light. So distracted by her glorious painting of colors, I scarcely realize my losses until the last fiery leaf has fallen to the ground and the final pumpkin shrinks. Autumn departs with a cold kiss, leaving me to suffer the frigid grasp of winter in prolonged nightfall. — Richelle E. Goodrich

It is the branch that bears the fruit, That feels the knife, To prune it for a larger growth, A fuller life. Though every budding twig be trimmed, And every grace Of swaying tendril, springing leaf, May lose its place. O you whose life of joy seems left, With beauty shorn; Whose aspirations lie in dust, All bruised and torn, Rejoice, though each desire, each dream, Each hope of thine Will fall and fade; it is the hand Of Love Divine That holds the knife, that cuts and breaks With tenderest touch, That you, whose life has borne some fruit, Might now bear much. Annie Johnson Flint — Lettie B. Cowman

Give me a land of boughs in leaf
A land of trees that stand;
Where trees are fallen there is grief;
I love no leafless land. — A.E. Housman

The tree made it's first move, the first overture of friendship. It allowed a leaf to fall. — Ruskin Bond

One can fall in love as often as a tree grows leaves. It is perfectly natural but not free of guilt and complications, unless one takes oneself to be a leaf. — David Ignatow

For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground. — Virginia Woolf

The heat of the incinerator wrapped around Inej like a living thing, a desert dragon in his den, hiding from the ice, waiting for her. She knew her body's limits, and she knew she had no more to give. She'd made a bad wager. It was as simple as that. The autumn leaf might cling to its branch, but it was already dead. The only question was when it would fall. — Leigh Bardugo

I have come to learn that there is no great manifest destiny, there is no universal order. Chaos will always reign supreme. There is no more order to the world than the falling of a leaf in a stiff fall breeze. That it will fall eventually is a truth, but which route it will take and where it will land are the great mysteries that evade us all. — Mark Tufo

I can pass days
Stretch'd in the shade of those old cedar trees,
Watching the sunshine like a blessing fall,
The breeze like music wandering o'er the boughs,
Each tree a natural harp,
each different leaf
A different note, blent in one vast thanksgiving. — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Lord, help me to be still before you. Lead me to a greater vision of who you are, and in so doing, may I see myself - the good, the bad, and the ugly. Grant me the courage to follow you, to be faithful to become the unique person you have created me to be. I ask you for the Holy Spirit's power to not copy another person's life or journey. "God, submerge me in the darkness of your love, that the consciousness of my false, everyday self falls away from [me] like a soiled garment. . . . May my 'deep self' fall into your presence. . . . knowing you alone . . . carried away into eternity like a dead leaf in the November wind."24 In Jesus' name, amen. — Peter Scazzero

October arrives in a swirl of fragrant blue leaf smoke, the sweetness of slightly frosted MacIntosh apples, and little hard acorns falling. We are in the midst of cool crisp days, purple mists, and Nature recklessly tossing her whole palette of dazzling tones through fields and woodlands. — Jean Hersey

You can learn from an ordinary bamboo leaf what ought to happen. It bends lower and lower under the weight of snow. Suddenly the snow slips to the ground without the leaf having stirred. Stay like that at the point of highest tension until the shot falls from you. So, indeed, it is: when the tension is fulfilled, the shot must fall, it must fall from the archer like snow from a bamboo leaf, before he even thinks it. — Eugen Herrigel

Indian summer comes gently, folds over the hills and valleys as softly as the fall of a leaf on a windless day. It is always unexpected. After a sharp cold spell, we wake one morning and look out and the very air is golden. The sky has a delicate dreamy color, and the yet unfallen leaves on the bravest trees have a secure look, as if they would never, never fall. — Gladys Taber

(Ravic speaking of a butterfly caught in the Louvre) In the morning it would search for flowers and life and the light honey of blossoms and would not find them and later it would fall asleep on millennial marble, weakened by then, until the grip of the delicate, tenacious feet loosened and it fell, a thin leaf of premature autumn. — Erich Maria Remarque

What we take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of the minutest event the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a sharpened feather. — Herman Melville

How could I tell him that I now wanted what he had once wanted
to travel on trains and fall in love with girls with dark eyes and extravagant lips? It didn't matter to me if at the end of it I had nothing to show but sore thighs. It wasn't my fault that the life of the wanderer, the wayfarer, had fallen out of favor with the world. So what if it was no longer acceptable to drift with the wind, asking for bread and a roof, sleeping on bales of hay and enjoying dalliances with barefooted farmgirls, then running away before the harvest? This was the life I wanted, blowing around like a leaf with appetites. — Steve Toltz

The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects. — James Gleick

The falling leaf that tells of autumn's death is, in a subtler sense, a prophecy of spring. — Robert Green Ingersoll

In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf. — T. S. Eliot

The wind picks up. It sends leaves scurrying for cover until a softer breeze blows through, settling them down again as if to say, Shhh, there, there, it's all right. One leaf still dances in the air. It spins higher and higher, defying gravity and logic, stretching for something just out of reach. It shall have to fall, of course. Eventually. But for now, I hold my breath, willing it to keep going, taking comfort in its struggle. — Libba Bray

Time in China has no immediacy as in America. Here I find the swift passage of our few earthly years accepted as naturally as the fall of flower and leaf ... I hear and speak a language in which grammar has no tense. Both scholars and illiterates, in ordinary daily speech, tell an event of centuries ago as casually as an incident of the hour. Only as my knowledge has accumulated have I been able to know whether something related happened just then or in some past dynasty. — Nora Waln

At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew McConaughey type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her. That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall ALL the time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer. — Chelsea Handler

Molecules form and dissolve, returning to the primordial soup of atoms. But consciousness survives the death of the molecules on which it rides. What was once a bundle of energy in a sunbeam turns into a leaf, only to fall and change again into soil. The change of state crosses many boundaries. A sunbeam is invisible, whereas leaves and soil are visible.A leaf is alive and growing,whereas sunbeams aren't.the colors of light, leaf, and soil are different, and so on.
But all these transformations exist as constructs of the mind.The actual energy present in the sunbeam experiences no change at all. — Deepak Chopra

Do I believe the execution will work out? Les Moonves said yes to Survivor based partly upon my show Eco-Challenge. He liked my way of filming outdoors. It was the first use of helicopters on a documentary with the gyro-stabilized lenses. And a certain beauty of filming, allowing the drops to fall from a leaf into a puddle, allowing a spider to weave a web. Taking the breath to allow that to happen rather than showing scene after scene. — Scott Raab

Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world.
But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,
So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.
And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree,
So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all.
Like a procession you walk together towards your god-self.
You are the way and the wayfarers.
And when one of you falls down he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone. — Kahlil Gibran

We live in a small world. Not a leaf falls that doesn't affect a myriad of things. When we reach out to someone in love and the effect is made - everyone, everything which comes in contact
with the person we've effected is better for it. Of course, the converse is true, too. — Leo Buscaglia

For me looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. Place is found by walking, direction determined by weather and season. I take the opportunity each day offers: if it is snowing, I work in snow, at leaf-fall it will be leaves; a blown over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches. — Andy Goldsworthy

Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed — W.E.B. Du Bois

Who can really say how decisions are made, how emotions change, how ideas arise? We talk about inspiration; about a bolt of lightnng from a clear sky, but perhaps everything is just as simple and just as infinitely complex as the processes that make a particular leaf fall at a particularmoment. That point has been reached, that's all. It has to happen, and it does happen. — John Ajvide Lindqvist