No town can fail of beauty, though its walks were gutters and its houses hovels, if venerable trees make magnificent colonnades along its streets. – Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs, 1887

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. – Willa Cather, 1913

I willingly confess to so great a partiality for trees as tempts me to respect a man in exact proportion to his respect for them. – James Russell Lowell

A tree which has lost its head will never recover it again, and will survive only as a monument of the ignorance and folly of its Tormentor. – George William Curtis