Tree Cutting Quotes & Sayings

What will the axemen do, when they have cut their way from sea to sea? — James F. Cooper

At the moment I'm so exhausted that I feel like cutting my throat, so the next news masy well be that I am across the river and under the trees: what is the meaning and purpose of life? Death. — Delmore Schwartz

But men are cutting down the trees without replacing them. For every tree that's felled, we must plant two. Otherwise, one day there'll be no forests at all, and the world will become one great desert. — Ruskin Bond

Christians, of all people, should not be destroyers. We should treat nature with an overwhelming respect. We may cut down a tree to build a house, or to make a fire to keep the family warm. But we should not cut down the tree just to cut down the tree. We may, if necessary, bark the cork tree in order to have the use of the bark. But what we should not do is to bark the tree simply for the sake of doing so, and let it dry and stand there a dead skeleton in the wind. To do so is not to treat the tree with integrity. — Francis Schaeffer

But look at Avatar [2009], one of the most globally viewed pieces of entertainment to have ever been made - the central emotional event of the whole movie was a tree being cut down. And the entire movie, essentially, is saying, "If we let the military industrial complex trash the place that we're living in, we will have committed an epic crime." — Edward Norton

Big? Sure. But, he can't catch mice! So for your big tree. No use? Then plant it in the wasteland - in emptiness. Walk idly around it and rest under it's shadow. No axe or saw prepares its end. No one will ever cut it down. Useless? You should worry!. — Zhuangzi

People like to say that time heals all wounds, but I don't believe it. I remember once Grandpa took me firewood cutting, and as we looked at the rings of the tree together, he pointed out the years where there was drought and the years where there was fire. So while time allowed for new growth that hid the scars of the past, those scars were still there, inside the tree, and part of the tree. I think about how I am like that tree. — Kaya McLaren

The first idea, the first art piece I ever did, was when I was four. I cut the seed of a pear in half and the seed of an apple in half in put those two halves together and planted the seed, hoping a very strange tree might grow. And I never stopped. — Yoko Ono

There used to be a rubbish heap under the great tree in Dhoby Ghaut with a sarabat stall parked next to it. It was a low, sprawling rubbish heap made up of the usual things - refuse from dustbins, paper, old tins and slippers and leaves from the tree above. Then one day, people forgot about it. They found a new dumping place and the old rubbish heap settled low on the ground. Time passed and its contents became warm and rich and fertile and people living in the area would take away potfuls of it to plant flowers in.

Somehow, a rose cutting, slim as a cheeping chicken's leg and almost brown, appeared on the rubbish heap one day. — Gregory Nalpon

I cut down trees, I skip and jump, I like to press wild flowers. I put on women's clothing and hang around in bars. — Michael Palin

You should issue demerits for tree cutting or the destruction of humus. — Donella Meadows

When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. — Hermann Hesse

The Pacific Yew can be cut down and processed to produce a potent chemical, taxol, which offers some promise of curing certain forms of lung, breast and ovarian cancer in patients who would otherwise quickly die ... It seems an easy choice - sacrifice the tree for a human life - until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated. — Al Gore

You may have decided again and again, and again and again you have failed - not because smoking is such a great phenomenon that you cannot get out of it, but because you are trying from the wrong end. Rather than becoming aware of the whole situation - why you smoke in the first place - rather than becoming aware of the process of smoking, you are simply trying to drop it. It is like pruning the leaves of a tree without cutting the roots. — Rajneesh

It cuts one sadly to see the grief of old people; they've no way o' working it off; and the new spring brings no new shoots out on the withered tree. — George Eliot

If your ancestors cut down all the trees, it's not your fault, but you still don't live in a forest. — Pam Oliver

One important thing was not to forget what he hoped to achieve in life. Another important thing was not to confuse a romantic picture of himself - as a doctor in Africa, for example - with a real possibility. And he tried not to lose sight of the fact that he was an adult in an adult world, with responsibilities. This was not easy: he would find himself sitting in the sun cutting out paper stars for a Christmas tree at the very moment other men were working to support large families or representing their countries in foreign places. When in moments of difficult truth-seeking he saw this incongruity, he felt sick that he should be saddled with himself, as though he were his own unwanted guest. — Lydia Davis

Cutting a tree down doesn't kill it; it erases it from history. — The Wombat

The most beautiful thing about a tree is what you do with it after you cut it down. — Rush Limbaugh

I cut my bow from the wood of this tree of evil. Of this tree of good, I want a kiss from your lips. — Bruce Springsteen

Thich Nhat Hanh has the ability to express some of the most profound teachings of interdependence and emptiness I've ever heard. With the eloquence of a poet, he holds up a sheet of paper and teaches us that the rain cloud and the tree and the logger who cut the tree down are all there in the paper. He's been one of the most significant carriers of the lamp of the dharma to the West that we have had. — Jack Kornfield

What have you to trade for my silence?" ...
He opened his mouth to beckon the men, but Eleri moved like lightning. With her right arm restrained, she couldn't cut him. However, her weapon of choice caught him completely off-guard.
Her lips sealed to his, cutting off his voice in a hard kiss...
Bracing his back against the gnarled tree branches, he relaxed for more, but the kiss ended as briskly as it had begun....
Blood surging through his body, Warren grinned and lowered his face over hers. "Not the price I had in mind, but...um, shall we see what else you have to offer? — Sandra Jones

In felling a tree we should cut into the trunk of it to the very heart, and then leave it standing so that the sap may drain out drop by drop throughout the whole of it ... Then and not till then, the tree being drained dry and the sap no longer dripping, let it be felled and it will be in the highest state of usefulness. — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

Felling a tree and gazing at the cut end - tonight's moon — Matsuo Basho

Throughout all of human history we've enjoyed certain benign circumstances: an envelope of atmosphere, an envelope of temperature. A kind of resilience that if you cut down trees, then they'll grow back. You take fish, they recover. You put stuff into the atmosphere that you know is not good for us, but we can still breathe. We haven't awakened, generally, to the sense of urgency that does exist. — Sylvia Earle

If i get 8 hours to cut a tree i'll
spend 7 hours to sharp my
knife. — Abraham Lincoln

She warned him that, if he got killed, she should cut down the great cedar at the south-west corner of Groby. It kept all the light out of the principal drawing-room and the bedrooms above it ... He winced: he certainly winced at that. She regretted that she had said it. It was along other lines that she desired to make him wince. — Ford Madox Ford

Everyone goes to the forest; some go for a walk to be inspired, and others go to cut down the trees. — Vladimir Horowitz

Since half of all trees cut go to making paper, the only meaningful way to address destruction of our forest is to change the way paper is made. — Woody Harrelson

When you set about your composing, it may be necessary for your ease, and better distillation of wit, to put on your worst clothes, and the worse the better; for an author, like a limbeck, will yield the better for having a rag about him: besides that, I have observed a gardener cut the outward rind of a tree (which is the surtout of it) to make it bear well; and this is a natural account of the usual poverty of poets, and is an argument why wits, of all men living, ought to be ill clad. — Jonathan Swift

But the sower going forth to sow sets foot into time to come, the seeds falling on his own place. He has prepared a way for his life to come to him, if it will. Like a tree, he has given roots to the earth, and stands free. — Wendell Berry

Humans eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. Suddenly, they start cutting reality up into bits and pieces, which is what the thinking mind does. — Eckhart Tolle

Where's your boyfriend, District 12? Still hanging on?" She asks.
Well, as long as we're talking I'm alive. "He's out there now. Hunting Cato," I snarl at her. Then I scream at the top of my lungs. "Peeta!"
Clove jams her fist into my windpipe, very effectively cutting off my voice. But her head's whipping from side to side, and I know for a moment she's at least considering I'm telling the truth. Since no Peeta appears to save me, she turns back to me.
"Liar," she says with a grin. "He's nearly dead. Cato knows where he cut him. You've probably got him strapped up in some tree while you try to keep his heart going. What's in the pretty little backpack? That medicine for Lover Boy? Too bad he'll never get it. — Suzanne Collins

The tree doesn't die, nor do I when you cut off a branch or a finger, we both heal so we don't lose all the sap or blood. That to me is total shock. Also that water defies the laws of physics by becoming less dense when frozen. Life really is a miracle and all the things that are been built into us through it. — Bernie Siegel

He who sees a gold bullion more valuable than a tree has surely an intelligence much less than a donkey's! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Gansey's phone buzzed.
"Gansey, man, is this diseased tree cutting into your digital time?" Ronan asked.
The fact was the digital time was cutting into his diseased tree time. — Maggie Stiefvater

People moved in across the street and are immediately cutting down a huge tree. Their toothbrushes will know my buttonhole. — Rob Delaney

If human beings could be propagated by cutting, like apple trees, aristocracy would be biologically sound. — John B. S. Haldane

Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds! — Henry David Thoreau

It is a very pretty observation of old Isaac Ambrose that the gum which exudes from the tree without cutting is always the best. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Does anyone pray before they cut a tree? I haven't seen anyone do that yet in the timber industry. But my vision is that that day is coming. I have a vision of a world in which we relate to each other as souls - not as personalities - not as bodies and minds and capabilities to accomplish things in this domain of the five sense, but as immortal spirits learning together how to co-create this world. — Gary Zukav

Clear-cutting" was the word for what the Rusties had done to the old forests: felling every tree, killing every living thing, turning entire countries into grazing land. Whole rain forests had been consumed, reduced from millions of interlocking species to a bunch of cows eating grass, a vast web of life traded for cheap hamburgers.
"Look, we're not clear-cutting. All we're doing is pulling out the garbage that the Rusties left behend," David said. "It just takes a little surgery to do it. — Scott Westerfeld

Just as a tree, though cut down, can grow again and again if its roots are undamaged and strong, in the same way if the roots of craving are not wholly uprooted sorrows will come again and again — Gautama Buddha

I cannot love evergreens - they are the misanthropes of nature. To them the spring brings no promise, the autumn no decline; they are cut off from the sweetest of all ties with their kind - sympathy ... I will have no evergreens in my garden; when the inevitable winter comes, every beloved plant and favorite tree shall drop together - no solitary fir left to triumph over the companionship of decay. — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Could a scar be like the rings of a tree, reopened with each emotional season? — Magenta Periwinkle

The suburb is a place where someone cuts down all the trees to build houses, and then names the streets after the trees. — Bill Vaughan

I feel like a lot of time my writing is like having about twenty boxes of Christmas decorations. But no tree. You're going, Where do I put this? Then they go, Okay, you can have a tree, but we'll blindfold you and you gotta cut it down with a spoon. — Carolyn Chute

It is easy to cut down the tree of liberty, but not so easy to restore it to life. — Toussaint Louverture

Cutting down that tree was my last war!" I asked him who won, which I thought was a nice question, because it would let him say that he won, and feel proud. He said, "The ax won! It's always that way! — Jonathan Safran Foer

It's okay for someone to chase me and then try to cut me off so I ram my car into a tree ... I mean, I know this guy was trying to do his job, but his "job" almost landed me half-dead. — Lindsay Lohan

When trees mature, it is fair and moral that they are cut for man's use, as they would soon decay and return to the earth. Trees have a yearning to live again, perhaps to provide the beauty, strength and utility to serve man, even to become an object of great artistic worth. — George Nakashima

The Commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details s cutting a hanged man from a tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of the man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter ob him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. — Chinua Achebe

If you want to cut down a tree, it is no use to climb into its branches. — Vinoba Bhave

We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. — George Orwell

When the savages of Louisiana wish to have fruit, they cut the tree at the bottom and gather the fruit. That is exactly a despotic government. — Baron De Montesquieu

Cut down the forest, not just a tree. Out of the forest of desire springs danger. By cutting down both the forest of desire and the brushwood of longing, be rid of the forest, bhikkhus. — Gautama Buddha

Is a PLONGEUR'S work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeling that it must be 'honest' work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I believe it is the same with a PLONGEUR. He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that he is doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a luxury which, very often, is no luxury at all. — George Orwell

I cannot tell a lie. I cut down the cherry tree. — George Washington

No longer is science asked to understand the world, or to improve any part of it. It is asked instead to immediately justify everything that happens ... spectacular domination has cut down the vast tree of scientific knowledge in order to make itself a truncheon. — Guy Debord

You know that the air and water are being polluted, as is everything we touch and live with, and we go on corrupting the nature that we need. We don't realize we have a commitment to God to take care of nature. To cut down a tree, to waste water when there is so much lack of it, to let buses poison our atmosphere with those noxious fumes from their exhausts, to burn rubbish haphazardly-all that concerns our alliance with God. — Oscar Romero

This tree is indeed a Tree of Life, for without the higher and finer sentiments man does not life; he merely exists. If any branch of that tree does not bear fruit, the Master tells us that it shall be cut off and cast into the fire. It is the duty of all living things to produce some truly constructive labor as recognition of the divine life which is within them. God is most glorified when His children glorify His spirit within themselves. — Manly Hall

Be like a tree. The tree gives shade even to him who cuts off its boughs. — Chaitanya Mahaprabhu

Writing, for me, is a little like wood carving. You find the lump of tree (the big central theme that gets you started), and you start cutting the shape that you think you want it to be. But you find, if you do it right, that the wood has a grain of its own (characters develop and present new insights, concentrated thinking about the story opens new avenues). If you're sensible, you work with the grain and, if you come across a knot hole, you incorporate that into the design. This is not the same as 'making it up as you go along'; it's a very careful process of control. — Terry Pratchett

He could still see the dragon just fine. It was about sixty feet long, snout to tail, its body made of interlocking bronze plates. Its claws were the size of butcher knives, and its mouth was lined with hundreds of dagger-sharp metal teeth. Steam came out of its nostrils. It snarled like a chain saw cutting through a tree. — Rick Riordan

You can cut down a tree with a hammer, but it takes about 30 days. If you trade the hammer for an ax, you can cut it down in about 30 minutes. The difference between 30 days and 30 minutes is skills. — Jim Rohn

Once upon a time there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. And they grew next to each other. And every day the straight tree would look at the crooked tree and he would say, "You're crooked. You've always been crooked and you'll continue to be crooked. But look at me! Look at me!" said the straight tree. He said, "I'm tall and I'm straight." And then one day the lumberjacks came into the forest and looked around, and the manager in charge said, "Cut all the straight trees." And that crooked tree is still there to this day, growing strong and growing strange. — Tom Waits

Don't let anything like trees in the Clearwater National Forest get in the way of providing jobs and fueling the economy, even if that means cutting down every last tree in the state. — Helen Chenoweth-Hage

Be not too slow in the breaking of a sinful custom; a quick, courageous resolution is better than a gradual deliberation; in such a combat he is the bravest soldier that lays about him without fear or wit. Wit pleads, fear disheartens; he that would kill Hydra had better strike off one neck than five heads: fell the tree, and the branches are soon cut off. — Francis Quarles

In clear-cutting, he said, you clear away the natural forest, or what the industrial forester calls "weed trees," and plant all one species of tree in neat straight functional rows like corn, sorghum, sugar beets or any other practical farm crop. You then dump on chemical fertilizers to replace the washed-away humus, inject the seedlings with growth-forcing hormones, surround your plot with deer repellants and raise a uniform crop of trees, all identical. When the trees reach a certain prespecified height (not maturity; that takes too long) you send in a fleet of tree-harvesting machines and cut the fuckers down. All of them. Then burn the slash, and harrow, seed, fertilize all over again, round and round and round again, faster and faster, tighter and tighter until, like the fabled Malaysian Concentric Bird which flies in ever-smaller circles, you disappear up your own asshole. — Edward Abbey

A political country is like an American forest; you have only to cut down the old trees, and immediately new trees come up to replace them. — Walter Bagehot

We will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can't reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree. — Martin Luther King Jr.

A beaver does not, as legend would have it, know which direction the tree will fall when he cuts it, but counts on alacrity to make up for lack of engineering expertise. — Ann Zwinger

I knew the tree when it grew, and the tree is now gone. The farmers cut it up, and it's become firewood. And there's this tremendous sense of absence and shock and violence attendant to that collapsing tree. — Andy Goldsworthy

He imagines the water running in thick curving lines, like the drawings of the tree's roots, cutting through stone and spilling over the earth. And then he reverses the flow of water, letting his imagination take over, and he sees the water racing north, uphill, towards the Catskills, weaving around towns, beneath bridges, rushing over stones and cutting through the trees, until it lands at the feet of Alice Pearson, who stands on the shore, looking out at the place where the water meets the sky. — Beth Hahn

I am convinced that those who get themselves involved in the machinery of power politics, even for the purpose of destroying it, are bound to fail in their purpose. To destroy it we have to stay out of it. If we want to cut down a tree, it is of no use to climb into its branches. The desire to keep contact with something, even to destroy it, is a subtle and insidious illusion. — Vinoba Bhave

There's no experience quite like cutting your own live Christmas tree out of your neighbor's yard. — Dan Florence

Just as a tree, though cut down, sprouts up again if its roots remain uncut and firm, even so, until the craving that lies dormant is rooted out, suffering springs up again and again. — Gautama Buddha

Merton. Gethsemani required a vow of silence, and at dinner if you wanted salt, you had to stare hard at the shaker until another brother noticed. One day, cutting down a tree, Jack couldn't contain himself. He held his head back and roared, "Timber." After that, his days at the monastery were numbered. Within a couple of years, he had married, and he and his young wife, Fran, who herself had just spent a year in a nunnery, opened a Catholic Worker farm in eastern Missouri for recovering alcoholics. — Alex Kotlowitz

As a tree, even though it has been cut down, is firm so long as its root is safe, and grows again, thus, unless the feeders of thirst are destroyed, the pain (of life) will return again and again. — Max Muller

A little kid asks my dad why that man is chopping down the tree.
Dad: He's not chopping it down. He's saving it. Those branches were long dead from disease. All plants are like that. By cutting off the damage you make it possible for the tree to grow again. You watch - by the end of summer, this tree will be the strongest on the block. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I think England has served me very well. I like living in London for the reasons I gave. I have absolutely no intentions of cutting those ties. There is absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly not, so that I can have a swimming pool and a palm tree. — Colin Firth

Stars. Trees breathe in starlight year after year, and it goes deep into their bones. So when you cut a tree open, you smell a hundred years' worth of light. Ancient starlight that took millions of years to reach earth. That's why trees smell so beautiful and old. — Frances O'Roark Dowell

A tree is a wonderful living organism which gives shelter, food, warmth and protection to all living things. It even gives shade to those who wield an axe to cut it down — Gautama Buddha

See, then, how powerful religion is; it commands the heart, it commands the vitals. Morality,
that comes with a pruning-knife, and cuts off all sproutings, all wild luxuriances; but religion lays the axe to the root of the tree. Morality looks that the skin of the apple be fair; but religion searcheth to the very core. — Nathaniel Culverwell

A nation who sits like cows on the fields while the country's trees are being cut down ruthlessly deserves the emptiest deserts thousands of times! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

To me, all the juice of a book is in an unpublished manuscript, and the published book is like a dead tree - just good for cutting up and building your house with. — Christina Stead

The value of the things is not in themselves autonomously, but that God made them, and thus they deserve to be treated with high respect. The tree in the field is to be treated with respect. It is not to be romanticized as the old lady romanticizes her cat (that is, she reads human reactions into it). This is wrong because it is not true. When you drive the axe into the tree when you need firewood, you are not cutting down a person; you are cutting down a tree. But while we should not romanticize the tree, we must realize God made it and it deserves respect because He made is as a tree. — Francis Schaeffer

Tree cutting and yoga, who knew Bethany was so multi-talented. — Tellulah Darling

I want a chainsaw very badly, because I think cutting down a tree would be unbelievably satisfying. I have asked for a chainsaw for my birthday, but I think I'll probably be given jewelry instead. — Susan Orlean

No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself. — John Muir