A Quote by Carl Sandburg

A tree is best measured when it is down - and so it is with people. — © Carl Sandburg
A tree is best measured when it is down - and so it is with people.
It's easy to enjoy your job and enjoy other people when things are going good. When you're faced with adversity is when the character of men is measured. There's a Mennonite proverb, 'Man, like a tree, is measured best when cut down.'
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.
But this tree in the yard-this tree that men chopped down...this tree that they built a bonfire around, trying to burn up it's stump-this tree lived! It lived! And nothing could destroy it.
If you go to a tree with an ax and take five whacks at the tree every day, it doesn't matter if it's an oak or a redwood; eventually the tree has to fall down.
I'm kind of a walking photographer, i love exploring new places. One day I was taking a break during an excursion in the Broceliande forest, looking for the best place to settle, when I discovered a small clearing with a tree without leaves. I stayed for hours looking around, taking some pictures and I found Le Coq lying down under the tree. The tree's branches were rising as if to touch the sky.
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.
In organizations, once you articulate how success will be measured, everybody tries to game the system so that they are measured in the best possible way.
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.
I ran to Rachel [Comey]'s show and on the way I found a potted tree - an umbrella tree - on the street. I always think things are going to be way more intimate than they are and there aren't going to be a lot of people around. I don't know why I think this. I'm always shocked at what a hoopla things are. They were like, 'Hurry up.' So I put the tree down and I see Rachel and she's like, 'Hurry up, sit down.'
How much I can learn from a tree! The tree is my church, the tree is my temple, the tree is my mantra, the tree is my poem and my prayer.
For an apple you can't reach up and pick, you have to climb that tree; the tree won't bend down for you!
When you chop down a tree you can look at the rings and see what the tree's been through. That's what you can do when you listen to my records.
Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree', or `that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.
There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky.
Where success is concerned, people are not measured in inches, or pounds, or college degrees, or family back-ground; they are measured by the size of their thinking.
I certainly don't sit down and plan a book out before I write it. There's a phrase I use called "The Valley Full of Clouds." Writing a novel is as if you are going off on a journey across a valley. The valley is full of mist, but you can see the top of a tree here and the top of another tree over there. And with any luck you can see the other side of the valley. But you cannot see down into the mist. Nevertheless, you head for the first tree.
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