Explore Quotes by Hal Borland

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.

You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.

Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.

October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again.

A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire, in magnitude at least, but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart.

If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.

April is a promise that May is bound to keep.

A snowdrift is a beautiful thing - if it doesn't lie across the path you have to shovel or block the road that leads to your destination.

Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.

Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.

As I stood and watched the mists slowly rising this morning I wondered what view was more beautiful than this.

A root, a stem, a leaf, some means of capturing sunlight and air and making food - in sum, a plant. The green substance of this earth, the chlorophyll, is all summed up in the plants. Without them we perish, all of us who are flesh and blood.

October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen.

All walking is discovery. On foot we take the time to see things whole.

Time after time ... today's crisis shrinks to next week's footnote to a newly headline disaster.

Listen to it, and you are hearing the mighty currents of the air rushing down the latitudes of the earth, currents from the Mackenzie and the Athabasca and the Saskatchewan, and from the prairies and the white Tundra. It is a homeless wind, forever on the move.

He who travels west travels not only with the sun but with history.

For all his learning or sophistication, man still instinctively reaches towards that force beyond. Only arrogance can deny its existence, and the denial falters in the face of evidence on every hand. In every tuft of grass, in every bird, in every opening bud, there it is.

Weekend planning is a prime time to apply the Deathbed Priority Test: On your deathbed, will you wish you'd spent more prime weekend hours grocery shopping or walking in the woods with your kids?

To see a hillside white with dogwood bloom is to know a particular ecstasy of beauty, but to walk the gray Winter woods and find the buds which will resurrect that beauty in another May is to partake of continuity.