Moss Quotes

• And when thou art weary I'll find thee a bed, Of mosses and flowers to pillow thy head.

  John Keats

  Art, Flower, Bed

  John Keats (1818). “The Complete Works of John Keats”, p.172

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• Nature doth thus kindly heal every wound. By the mediation of a thousand little mosses and fungi, the most unsightly objects become radiant of beauty. There seem to be two sides of this world, presented us at different times, as we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death. And seen with the eye of the poet, as God sees them, all things are alive and beautiful.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Beautiful, Eye, Two Sides

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• 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.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Lying, Years, Circles

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2013). “The Signature of All Things”, p.169, A&C Black

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• There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the under currents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.

  John Hay

  Nature, Water, Tree

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• A rolling stone gathers no moss, but it gains a certain polish.

  Oliver Herford

  Deep Thought, Rolling, Stones

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• The liveness in me just loves to feel the liveness in growing things, in grass and rain and leaves and flowers and sun and feathers and furs and earth and sand and moss.

  Emily Carr

  Rain, Flower, Fur

  Emily Carr (2009). “Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr”, p.326, D & M Publishers

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• Moss is inconceivably strong. Moss eats stone; scarcely anything, in return, eats moss. Moss dines upon boulders, slowly but devastatingly, in a meal that lasts for centuries. Given enough time, a colony of moss can turn a cliff into gravel, and turn that gravel into topsoil.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Strong, Enough Time, Meals

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2013). “The Signature of All Things”, p.169, A&C Black

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• Content is to the mind like moss to a tree; it bindeth it up so as to stop its growth.

  Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax

  Tree, Growth, Mind

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• I sleep with my feet on moss carpets, my branches in the cotton of the clouds.

  Anais Nin

  Sleep, Clouds, Feet

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• Dark green is my favorite color. It's the color of nature and the color of money and the color of moss!

  Leonardo DiCaprio

  Dark, Color, Green

  Biography/Personal, www.imdb.com.

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• He who steps on stones is glad to feel the smallest spray of moss beneath his feet.

  Anna Katharine Green

  Sympathy, Condolences, Feet

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• The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  God, Doctrine, Cobwebs

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.289, Library of America

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• This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms. Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Ocean, Twilight, Sadness

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1867). “The Poetical Works of H. W. Longfellow. Complete Edition”, p.98

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• One must always be careful not to let one's work be covered with moss.

  Marc Chagall

  Be Careful, Careful, Covered

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• My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Thinking, Vegetables

  Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.50, Profile Books

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• The early bird gathers no moss! The rolling stone catches the worm.

  Jim Carrey

  Bird, Rolling, Stones

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• The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Rocks, Rolling, Alive

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.142, Simon and Schuster

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• As the rolling stone gathers no moss, so the roving heart gathers no affections.

  Anna Brownell Jameson

  Change, Heart, Rolling

  Anna Brownell Jameson (2009). “Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada”, p.200, New Canadian Library

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• The difference between the Japanese and the American is summed up in their opposite reactions to the proverb (popular in both nations), "A rolling stone gathers no moss." Epidemiologist S. Leonard Syme observes that to the Japanese, moss is exquisite and valued; a stone is enhanced by moss; hence a person who keeps moving and changing never acquires the beauty and benefits of stability. To Americans, the proverb is an admonition to keep rolling, to keep from being covered with clinging attachments.

  Carol Tavris

  Moving, Opposites, Differences

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• A tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you can see. Roots to leaves, yes-those you can, in part, see. But it is more-it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots, a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one.

  Elizabeth Moon

  Thinking, Roots, Community

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• Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.

  John Burroughs

  Travel, Men, Rolling

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• Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss.... We easily forget that we are track-markers, through, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete--and these are substances not easily impressed.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Animal, Journey, Snow

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• A rolling stone can gather no moss.

  Publilius Syrus

  Change, Rolling, Stones

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• And shade the violets, That they may bind the moss in leafy nets.

  John Keats

  May, Shade, Violet

  John Keats, Helen Vendler (1990). “Poetry Manuscripts at Harvard”, p.32, Harvard University Press

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• The universe is represented in every one of it's particles. Everything is made of one hidden stuff. The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God appears with all His parts in every moss and cobweb.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Dew, Doctrine, World

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