Top 49 Tropics Quotes & Sayings

[On Malaysia:] Mr. Darwin says so truly that a visit to the tropics (and such tropics) is like a visit to a new planet. This new wonder-world, so enchanting, tantalising, intoxicating, makes me despair, for I cannot make you see what I am seeing!

Let a man be firmly principled in his religion, he may travel from the tropics to the poles, it will never catch cold on the journey.

Creole women take after Europe in their intelligence, after the Tropics in the illogical violence of their passions, and after the Indies in the apathetic indolence with which they commit or suffer good and evil.

Bermuda is not even tropical. The charm of the tropics - the heat, the chaos - is not there.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans - which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

I greatly enjoyed the Hawaiian Islands. They are a real little paradise in spite of the influx of Americans who have made it one of their most pleasant 'centers of resort': the soft climate and luxuriance of the tropics; the greenness, the fragrance, the flowers - extraordinary flowers covering the tallest trees and turning them into huge bouquets.

Rainforests are not confined to the tropics: a good definition is forest wet enough to support epiphytes - plants that grow on other plants. Particularly in the west of Britain, where tiny fragments persist, you can find trees covered in rich growths of a fern called polypody, mosses and lichens, and flowering plants climbing the lower trunks.

It had always been a notion of mine that sanity is like a clearing in the jungle where the humans agree to meet from time to time and behave in certain fixed ways that even a baboon could master, like Englishmen dressing for dinner in the tropics.

Moss grows where nothing else can grow. It grows on bricks. It grows on tree bark and roofing slate. It grows in the Arctic Circle and in the balmiest tropics; it also grows on the fur of sloths, on the backs of snails, on decaying human bones. ... It is a resurrection engine. A single clump of mosses can lie dormant and dry for forty years at a stretch, and then vault back again into life with a mere soaking of water.

Forests in the tropics are cut to make pasture to raise beef for the American market. Our distance from the source of our food enables us to be superficially more comfortable, and distinctly more ignorant.

...I will praise the English climate till I die—even if I die of the English climate. There is no weather so good as English weather. Nay, in a real sense there is no weather at all anywhere but in England. In France you have much sun and some rain; in Italy you have hot winds and cold winds; in Scotland and Ireland you have rain, either thick or thin; in America you have hells of heat and cold, and in the Tropics you have sunstrokes varied by thunderbolts. But all these you have on a broad and brutal scale, and you settle down into contentment or despair.

I wanted to go into the tropics and save animals - and write, of course.

I'm a sucker for turquoise sea, white beaches and palm trees. I've been to the tropics every year since I could afford it. It's the perfect place to unwind. I can chill out, read, do a bit of yoga.

These European White Men, then, with civilization in their blood and in their destiny, crossed the Atlantic and set up a new civilization on a bleak and rock bound coast. It was the White Men who drove north to Alaska and west to California; the men who opened up the tropics and subdued the Arctics; the men who mastered the African Veldts; the men who peopled Australia and seized the gates of the world at Suez, Gibraltar and Panama.

He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and extract a motive power out of the greatest obstacles. Most begin to veer and tack as soon as the wind changes from aft, and as within the tropics it does not blow from all points of the compass, there are some harbors which they can never reach.

I love going to the beach in the tropics and doing whatever I do - surfing, swimming or being - and the glow when I get a tan that deepens. I walk around with red and gold in my skin and feel like the most beautiful thing on the planet!

Mary Mackey joins other visionary poets of dpaysement . . . recovering a lost part of herself in the edgy lyricism of the tropics, haunted by fado, forr, and death. The lines are tense with the vulnerability of lovers, strangers, and travelers with no ticket home.

Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition." "And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages on the depths of the seven seas, and through the salt they reel with drunken delight and in the tropics tremble they with love and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.

By 2050, at bio-extinction's current rate, between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of all species will have disappeared or be too few in numbers to survive. There'll be a few over-visited parks, the coral reefs will be beaten up, grasslands overgrazed. Vast areas of the tropics that have lost their forests will have the same damn weeds, bushes and scrawny eucalyptus trees so that you don't know if you're in Africa or the Americas.

A finer body of men has never been gathered by any nation than the men who have done the work of building the Panama Canal; the conditions under which they have lived and have done their work have been better than in any similar work ever undertaken in the tropics; they have all felt an eager pride in their work; and they have made not only America but the whole world their debtors by what they have accomplished.

Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

It's a fair guess that at the rate we're destroying habitat, especially but not exclusively in the tropics, we're pushing to extinction about one species every hour. That doesn't count the species whose populations are being reduced so greatly that diversity within the population is essentially gone.

Children, as well as grown-ups, in their individual, glorified, drudgery-proof homes of Labrador, the tropics, the Orient, or where you will, to which they can pass with pleasure and expedition by means of ever-improving transportation, will be able to tune in their television and radio to the moving picture lecture of, let us say, President Lowell of Harvard; the professor of Mathematics of Oxford; of the doctor of Indian antiquities of Delhi, etc.

The white man in the tropics degenerates every day.

True, when you behold Damascus from the Salahiyeh, the last slope of the Anti-Lebanon, it is the realization of all that you have dreamed of Oriental splendor; the world has no picture more dazzling. It is Beauty carried to the Sublime, as I have felt when overlooking some boundless forest of palms within the tropics.

In the tropics the white feels weakened, or downright weak, whence comes the heightened tendency to outbursts of aggression. People who are polite, modest or even humble in Europe fall easily into a rage here, get into fights, destroy other people. . .

Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven't. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven't. Later still - at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) - it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven't. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.

The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitants of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics.

One of the men attached to the prison was the occasion of great amusement on the part of the prisoners, as well as the spectators, by taking a large lump of ice to show these strangers from the tropics

In temperate zones, winter is the best insecticide; it keeps the bugs in check. The tropics enjoy no such respite, so plants there have developed a wide range of alkaloids that kill off nosy insects and animals.

In 'Snow for Mother', a mother waits for her little boy to grow up so that she can take him to Alaska to experience the real snow, which he never knew as a little boy in the tropics.

If you go from the USA - which, relative to the rest of the world, is in pretty good shape in terms of biodiversity and sustainability - to the tropics, everything gets worse. You have Indonesia, which is destroying its own forest. In West Africa there's no control whatsoever. It's a global situation. For that reason it ties in clearly with the needs and relationships of low-income countries.

There's no twilight in the tropics. Night falls like a curtain.

Alike and ever alike, we are on all continents in the need of love, food, clothing, work, speech, worship, sleep, games, dancing, fun. From tropics to arctics humanity live with these needs so alike, so inexorably alike.

Agriculture is the #1 source of deforestation. By some estimates it accounts for 80% of the forests chopped down in the tropics.

The earth has continued to change, from rapid climatic changes that have caused the glaciers and the ice sheets to basically bulldoze the landscape and cause species compression in the tropics and cause mass species extinction - you know, all these huge changes. In terms of evolution, every species is doomed to eventual extinction. The natural world is constantly changing. So, to deal with "environmental problems," in quotes, totally misses the issue. That is not the way we want to define our problem if we're going to find our solution.

I've always been under the impression that it would be such a bummer to be in a peaceful place like Hawaii or the tropics and be stressed about catching waves.

A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and flagrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway.

Love, in this world, is like a seed taken from the tropics, and planted where the winter comes too soon; and it cannot spread itself in flower-clusters and wide-twining vines, so that the whole air is filled with the perfume thereof. But there is to be another summer for it yet. Care for the root now, and God will care for the top by and by.

Who when examining in the cabinet of the entomologist the gay and exotic butterflies, and singular cicadas, will associate with these lifeless objects, the ceaseless harsh music of the latter, and the lazy flight of the former - the sure accompaniments of the still, glowing noonday of the tropics.

A grateful loving heart carries with it, under every parallel of latitude, the warmth and light of the tropics. It plants its Eden in the wilderness and solitary place, and sows with flowers the gray desolation of rock and mosses.

One of the men attached to the prison was the occasion of great amusement on the part of the prisoners, as well as the spectators, by taking a large lump of ice to show these strangers from the tropics.

My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.

People talk about cold weather and it'd be tough to catch balls. But the greatest catcher of all time, Michael Crabtree, catches everything. It's unbelievable. In the northern snowlands, down to the tropics' sunny scenes, he's catching the football. Where they throw a football, he'll be catching it.

I know that at one time, the Arctic was the tropics. And I guess I wonder what caused that? Was it dinosaur farts? I don’t know.

...the need for a garden of rare palms and vines and ornamental trees and shrubs which would be near enough to a growing city to form a quiet place where children with their elders could peer, as it were, into those fascinating jungles and palm glades of the tropics which have for generations stimulated the imaginations of American youth.

I can generate suctional forces, which act indirectly and are entirely undetectable. No current of air can be noticed; only an almost imperceptible cooling, as occurs when air is sucked in strongly with the back of the hand held in front of the mouth. It is therefore incorrect to say that I have copied the cyclones and typhoons of the tropics.

We have the most beautiful planet - the Rockies, the purple fields of the United States, the Lake District, the Pyrenees, the turquoise seas of the tropics.

Most agreeable are the memories of events and labours, connected with the cruise:- of companions in travel, ... of coral islands with their groves, and beautiful life, above and below the waters, ... of lofty precipices, richly draped, even the sternest fronts made to smile and be glad, as delights the gay tropics, and alive with waterfalls, gliding, leaping, or plunging, on their way down from the giddy heights, and, as they go, playing out and in amid the foliage...