Tropics Quotes

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.

John Greenleaf Whittier

Gratitude, Flower, Grateful

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[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!

Isabella Bird

Travel, Despair, World

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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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Winter, Snow, Soil

Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.63, Courier Corporation

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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.

Carl Sandburg

Fun, Sleep, Games

Carl Sandburg. (1954). “The Family of Man”

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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.

Henry Ward Beecher

Love, Summer, Flower

Henry Ward Beecher (1858). “Life Thoughts”, p.43

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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.

D. H. Lawrence

Strong, Sex, Rocks

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

Waldemar Young

Fall, Twilight, Night

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...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.

David Fairchild

Children, Garden, Cities

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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...

James Dwight Dana

Beautiful, Nature, Memories

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...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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Real, Rain, America

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My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.

Manuel Puig

Literature, Aspiration

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

Ramez Naam

Agriculture, Forests, Source

Source: bigthink.com

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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.

Jim Harbaugh

Football, Weather, People

"The Ballad of Michael Crabtree - it's catchy" by Ann Killion, www.sfgate.com. January 11, 2014.

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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.

Stuart L. Pimm

Weed, Numbers, Tree

"Mass Extinction Not Inevitable". The Wired Interview, www.wired.com. March 20, 2004.

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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.

Viktor Schauberger

Air, Hands, Cyclones

Viktor Schauberger, Callum Coats (2000). “The Energy Evolution – Harnessing Free Energy from Nature: Volume 4 of Renowned Environmentalist Viktor Schauberger’s Eco-Technology Series”, p.192, Gill & Macmillan Ltd

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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.

George Eliot

Running, Time, Travel

George Eliot (2016). “Complete Works Of George Eliot”, p.1155, ShandonPress

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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.

Wilfrid

Dinner, Way, Sanity

"In Love with Daylight". Book by Wilfrid Sheed, 1995.

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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.

Dennis Nurkse

Home, Visionaries, Lines

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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.

Julian Barnes

Sex, Grief, Hands

Julian Barnes (2013). “Levels of Life”, p.68, Random House

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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.

Henry David Thoreau

Blow, Wind, Sailing

Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.688, Simon and Schuster

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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.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Children, Moving, Mean

"4D Timelock". Book by Buckminster Fuller, 1928.

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The white man in the tropics degenerates every day.

Christina Stead

Men, White Man, Colonialism

Christina Stead (2016). “The Man Who Loved Children”, p.143, Head of Zeus

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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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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.

Charles Darwin

Butterfly, Gay, Glowing

Charles Darwin (1864). “Journal of Researches Into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World: Under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy”, p.299

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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.

Honore de Balzac

Women, Passion, Europe

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