Explore Quotes by Hal Borland

There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter. One is the January thaw. The other is the seed catalogues.

The most unhappy thing about conservation is that it is never permanent. Save a priceless woodland or an irreplaceable mountain today, and tomorrow it is threatened from another quarter.

Nothing in nature is as simple as it sometimes seems when reduced to words.

Nature seems to look after her own only up to a certain point; beyond that they are supposed to fend for themselves.

There are some things, but not too many, toward which the countryman knows he must be properly respectful if he would avoid pain, sickness and injury. Nature is neither punitive nor solicitous, but she has thorns and fangs as wells as bowers and grassy banks.

There are no idealists in the plant world and no compassion. The rose and the morning glory know no mercy. Bindweed, the morning glory, will quickly choke its competitors to death, and the fencerow rose will just as quietly crowd out any other plant that tried to share its roothold. Idealism and mercy are human terms and human concepts.

There are no limits to either time or distance, except as man himself may make them. I have but to touch the wind to know these things.

The ultimate wisdom which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls faith rather than reason.

Man is wise and constantly in quest of more wisdom; but the ultimate wisdom, which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed.

Any river is really the summation of a whole valley. It shapes not only the land but the life and even the culture of that valley. To think of any river as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part of it.

For anyone who lives in the oak-and-maple area of New England, there is a perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October.

To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.

March is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes and a laugh in her voice.

No Winter lasts forever, no Spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it.

Man is not an aquatic animal, but from the time we stand in youthful wonder beside a Spring brook till we sit in old age and watch the endless roll of the sea, we feel a strong kinship with the waters of this world.

Each new season grows from the leftovers from the past. That is the essence of change, and change is the basic law.

For the Fall of the year is more than three months bounded by an equinox and a solstice. It is a summing up without the finality of year's end.

Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity; but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?

Of all the seasons, autumn offers the most to man and requires the least of him.

You fight dandelions all weekend, and late Monday afternoon there they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity.

In a painful time of my life I went often to a wooded hillside where May apples grew by the hundreds, and I thought the sourness of their fruit had a symbolism for me. Instead, I was to find both love and happiness soon thereafter. So to me [the May apple] is the mandrake, the love symbol, of the old dealers in plant restoratives.