Good Forests Quotes & Sayings

You know, when life presents you only good things and you idealize them to your way.
And abruptly it comes up an avalanche of catastrophes and destroys all your beautiful dreams, as a war that destroys an entire country or a volcano that devastates forests.
That's how I feel and I write in this diary 'How everything should have been' in my life. — Pet Torres

I'm a Russian and all I know of Russia is what I've read. I yearn for the broad fields of golden corn and the forests of silver beech that I've read of in books and though I try and try, I can't see them with my mind's eye. I know Moscow from what I've seen of it at the cinema. I sometimes rack my brain to picture to myself a Russian village, the straggling village of log houses with their thatched roofs that you read about in Chekov, and it's no good, I know that what I see isn't that at all. I'm a Russian and I speak my native language worse than I speak English and French. When I read Tolstoi and Dostoievsky it is easier for me to read them in a translation. I'm just as much a foreigner to my own people as I am to the English and French. You who've got a home and a country, people who love you, people whose ways are your ways, whom you understand without knowing them - how can you tell what it is to belong nowhere? — W. Somerset Maugham

What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute. — Andrew Jackson

There was more than one Cabeswater. Or more than one of whatever it was. How many? He didn't know. How alive was it? He didn't know that, either. Did it THINK, was it an alien, did it die, was it good, was it right? He didn't know. But he knew there was more than one, and this one stretched its fingers out as hard as it could to reach the other. The enormity of the enormity of the world grew and grew inside Adam, and he didn't know if he could hold it. He was just a boy. Was he meant to know this? They had transformed Henrietta already by waking this ley line and strengthening Cabeswater. What would a world look like with more forests woken all over it? Would it tear itself apart with crackling energy and magic, or was this a pendulum swing, a result of hundreds of years of sleep? How many kings slept? — Maggie Stiefvater

What has to happen to us before we understand that we have to take good care of everything we have, of every tree in our boundless forests, every little stream that isn't even marked on the maps, every village with only five households, every soldier drafted into the army, every man in the street toiling under his dreary daily burden? What will it take to change us? — Sergei Lukyanenko

All well and good, but for our purposes these otherwise-valuable insights are mere subplots almost designed to carry us down side trails while blithely humming a tune about the rough equivalence of forests and trees. — Joseph J. Ellis

They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers. — James G. Watt

Except on their southern borders the great northern forests are not good as a permanent home for man. — Ellsworth Huntington

Here you do have forests, where pigs could be raised by letting them root about in the forests for a good part of the year. Therefore, you have a different attitude toward them compared with what continues to exist in the Middle East. — Marvin Harris

The unholy alliance of science, technology, and industry has given birth to monstrous offspring that threaten the very future of the planet. From factory farming to the harvesting of human eggs, commodified science and technology comes with a utilitarian ethic. Life is cheap. Forests, animals, and people are raw materials. Everyone and everything is expendable.50 Whatever brings the greatest profit is worth the violence. God is calling the church in the night to retrieve the meaning of stewardship first and foremost as caring for the earth.51 Evangelism is not good news until it is good news for all of creation, for humanity, animals, plants, water, and soil, for the earth that God created and called good. — Elaine A. Heath

Oh, ants, my sisters, good old honeydew-seekers! From close up you are sticky and shiny and gristly; and your nymphs have parasitic red mites stuck to them. You are too intent upon your chewing and gathering to listen to me, but I tell you that despite my warm feelings I really do not like you, and I cannot feel sorry for you in any way because there are too many of you and you are not cute at all. You eat too much of my forests; you are a rebellious tribe, and I will destroy you; I will poison your nests with sweet-smelling traps. — William T. Vollmann

Each of us hides our own private Delaware lost in the gray jungle-tangle of our brains. No one else can know its depths and byways. No one else can know the height of its towers, the secrets of its tides and pools. There will always be lost lagoons to find there, and ruins almost hidden by the sand. There will always be monsters of great beauty and good men with ugly frowns. The forests are dark but lights bob among the branches. You are at home there, more at home than anyplace else, and yet you will never go there in your life. Their legends are yours. The pirates sale around the cape, a crew of skeletons in the rigging. Milkmaids run down mountain passes, dragging kites behind them. Wizards crack their backs after long days of chalk and incantation while above the crowded bazaars, over the golden temples, against the setting sun, around the ruddy minarets, the pterodactyls call out a long farewell. — M T Anderson

In the case of Switzerland, a whole country is concerned with the species-appropriate treatment of all things green. The constitution reads, in part, that "account [is] to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms." So it's probably not a good idea to decapitate flowers along the highway in Switzerland without good reason. Although this point of view has elicited a lot of head shaking in the international community, I, for one, welcome breaking down the moral barriers between animals and plants. When the capabilities of vegetative beings become known, and their emotional lives and needs are recognized, then the way we treat plants will gradually change, as well. Forests are not first and foremost lumber factories and warehouses for raw material, and only secondarily complex habitats for thousands of species, which is the way modern forestry currently treats them. Completely the opposite, in fact. — Peter Wohlleben

We spend just as much time - more even - studying dragons, learning their habits, cataloging what they eat, mapping where they go. See, the Earth is changing around us at a crazy pace. Forests are disappearing, ice caps are melting, the climate is shifting. There are people working to protect other species - the polar bears and wolves, turtles, gorillas. But who's looking out for dragons?" Dominick's voice was low and urgent. "We are the only people in the world who know about them. If we're going to do a good job protecting them, we sure as heck better understand them. — J.A. Blackburn

Colleague, given that I'm detached to go hunting bandits, I'd be grateful for the continued loan of your horses until we return. A squadron of cavalry could make all the difference when we're chasing around the forests after shadows.'
Licinius gave him a jaundiced look. 'You've got sticky fingers, young man. Every soldier that comes into contact with your cohort seems to end up as part of it. Hamian archers, borrowed cavalrymen. I'll even wager you that the half-century of legionaries Dubnus borrowed from the Sixth will end up in your establishment. And yes, you can extend the loan if you think it'll do you any good, and you can keep that decurion you promoted to command them. — Anthony Riches

Despite all their flaws, zoos wake us up. They invite us to step outside our most basic assumptions. Offered for our contemplation, the animals remind us of nature's impossibly varied schemes for survival, all the strategies that species rely upon for courtship and mating and protecting the young and establishing dominance and hunting for something to eat and avoiding being eaten. On a good day, zoos shake people into recognizing the manifold possibilities of existence, what it's like to walk across the Earth, or swim in its oceans of fly above its forests - even though most animals on display will never have the chance to do any of those things again, at least not in the wild. — Thomas French

We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.
(pg. 73, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine") — Wendell Berry

As you walk through forests or the meadows of your mind, Stop and talk to those you fear Good friendships you may find — Stephen Cosgrove

I think cities are the primordial forests of our time. We evolve faster as a species in cities. Cities are chaotic, liminal places where the many aspects of human potential, good and/or bad, are most readily magnified. — Chris Abani

An English wood is like a good many other things in life
very promising at a distance, but a hollow mockery when you get within. You see daylight on both sides, and the sun freckles the very bracken. Our woods need the night to make them seem what they ought to be
what they once were, before our ancestors' descendants demanded so much more money, in these so much more various days. ("The Striding Place") — Gertrude Atherton

Walk aimlessly in the streets; this is a good meditation! Walk aimlessly in the forests; this is a good meditation! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The home world exercises its siren call over us all. No matter how far we wander, or how long we are gone, it waits patiently. And when we return to it, as we must, it sings to us. We came out of its forests, waded ashore from its seas. It is in our blood, for good or ill. — Jack McDevitt

I've always wished that spring would come ... because I was so afraid of the cold world, cloaked in white. It did nothing but make me curl myself into a ball. I had always kept myself curled up, but never once really tried to take a good look at winter ...
The softness of the snowflakes that fall without a sound, the beautiful forests that are as splendid as a white flower in bloom, and if you have that special person to share it all with ... that white world can be utterly beautiful. — Hajin Yoo

The psychiatrist wants to know why I go out and hike around in the forests and watch the birds and collect butterflies. I'll show you my collection some day."
"Good."
"They want to know what I do with my time. I tell them that sometimes I just sit and think. But I won't tell them what. I've got them running. And sometimes, I tell them, I like to put my head back, like this, and let the rain fall in my mouth. It tastes just like wine. Have you ever tried it? — Ray Bradbury

Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as Nabokov called it.
Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. — Azar Nafisi

Because fulfillment is an illusion, the wise must devote themselves to avoiding pain rather than seeking pleasure, living quietly, as Schopenhauer counseled, 'in a small fireproof room' - advice that now struck Nietzsche as both timid and untrue, a perverse attempt to dwell, as he was to put it pejoratively several years later, 'hidden in forests like shy deer.' Fulfillment was to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by recognizing its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to reaching anything good. — Alain De Botton

Us comics guys tend to get really good at the things we draw a lot. I'm good at creepy old forests, Victorian houses, underground goblin cities, and beautiful but creepy fairies. — Ted Naifeh

Much can they praise the trees so straight and high, The sailing pine,the cedar proud and tall, The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry, The builder oak, sole king of forests all, The aspin good for staves, the cypress funeral, The laurel, meed of mighty conquerors And poets sage, the fir that weepest still, The yew obedient to the bender's will, The birch for shafts, the sallow for the mill, The myrrh sweet-bleeding in the bitter wound, The warlike beech, the ash for nothing ill, The fruitful olive, and the platane round, The carver holm, the maple seldom inward sound. — Edmund Spenser

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

Well, the traveling teachers do come through every few months," said the Baron.
"Yes, sir, I know, sir, and they're useless, sir. They teach facts, not understanding. It's like teaching people about forests by showing them a saw. I want a proper school, sir, to teach reading and writing, and most of all thinking, sir, so people can find what they're good at, because someone doing what they really like is always an asset to any country, and too often people never find out until it's too late. — Terry Pratchett

Note even Jonathan Swift would dare to write a satire in which politicians argued that - in a world where species are vanishing and more than a billion people are barely able to afford to eat - it would somehow be good for the planet to clear rain-forests to grow palm oil, or give up food-crop land to grow biofuels, solely so that people could burn fuel derived from carbohydrate rather than hydrocarbons in their cars, thus driving up the price of food for the poor. Ludicrous is too weak a word for this heinous crime. — Matt Ridley

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief. — Franz Kafka

I'm not a preacher, and I'm certainly not a good example, but I have my own feelings about God. I'm kind of a nature guy. My cathedral is forests, or the prairies, or the beach. — Neil Young

May with its light behaving
Stirs vessel, eye and limb,
The singular and sad
Are willing to recover,
And to each swan-delighting river
The careless picnics come
In living white and red.

Our dead, remote and hooded,
In hollows rest, but we
From their vague woods have broken,
Forests where children meet
And the white angel-vampires flit,
Stand now with shaded eye,
The dangerous apple taken.

The real world lies before us,
Brave motions of the young,
Abundant wish for death,
The pleasing, pleasured, haunted:
A dying Master sinks tormented
In his admirers' ring,
The unjust walk the earth.

And love that makes impatient
Tortoise and roe, that lays
The blonde beside the dark,
Urges upon our blood,
Before the evil and the good
How insufficient is
Touch, endearment, look. — W. H. Auden

And so when we talk about intangible values remember that they cannot be separated from the others. The conservation of waters, forests, soils, and wildlife are all involved with the conservation of the human spirit. The goal we all strive toward is happiness, contentment, the dignity of the individual, and the good life. This goal will elude us forever if we forget the importance of the intangibles. — Sigurd F. Olson

And at this moment in history, our core value happens to be the raw, aching truth of the human predicament. It may also be the only belief that can save us as a species. A species that will continue to find comfort and delight in the companionship of animals, the miracle of birds, the colours of the corals and the majesty of the forests. We are in it together, on this blue spinning marble in the cold and silent void. And we must act on that belief, if we are going to be able to continue to live a good life here, in this beautiful and fragile country, on this lovely planet, our only home. — Geraldine Brooks

They absorb carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and give out oxygen. What could be more desirable? And they look good in the bargain. Stop chopping down the rain forests and plant more saplings, and we're on our way. — Isaac Asimov

It is a good success to take people from the city to the forests; but there is a much greater success: To bring the forest to the people, to the cities! To bring heaven to the hell! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

They were all women's magazines, but they weren't like the magazines my mother and sister read. The articles in my mother's and sister's magazines were always about sex and personal gratification. They had titles like "Eat Your Way to Multiple Orgasms," "Office Sex - How to Get It," "Tahiti: The Hot New Place for Sex," and "Those Shrinking Rain Forests - Are They Any Good for Sex?" The British magazines addressed more modest aspirations. They had titles like "Knit Your Own Twin Set," "Money-Saving Button Offer," "Make This Super Knitted Soap-Saver," and "Summer's Here - It's Time for Mayonnaise! — Bill Bryson