Top 50 Hal Borland Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.”

— Hal Borland

Featured in: Persistence Quotes, Patience Quotes, Values Quotes, Nature Quotes, Plant Quotes

2. “Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.”

— Hal Borland

3. “No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.”

— Hal Borland

Featured in: Spring Quotes, This Too Shall Pass Quotes, Winter Quotes

4. “No Winter lasts forever, no Spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it.”

— Hal Borland

Featured in: New Beginnings Quotes, Nature Quotes, New Month Quotes, Bloom Quotes, Spring Quotes

5. “April is a promise that May is bound to keep.”

— Hal Borland

6. “All our yesterdays are summarized in our now, and all the tomorrows are ours to shape.”

— Hal Borland

7. “October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again.”

— Hal Borland

8. “Each new season grows from the leftovers from the past. That is the essence of change, and change is the basic law.”

— Hal Borland

Featured in: Moving Forward Quotes

9. “He who travels west travels not only with the sun but with history.”

— Hal Borland

10. “March is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes and a laugh in her voice.”

— Hal Borland

11. “To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.”

— Hal Borland

12. “All man has to do is cooperate with the big forces, the sun, the rain, the growing urge. Seeds sprout, stems grow, leaves spread in the sunlight. Man plants, weeds, cultivates and harvests. It sounds simple, and it is simple, with the simplicity of great truths.”

— Hal Borland

13. “There are no limits to either time or distance, except as man himself may make them. I have but to touch the wind to know these things.”

— Hal Borland

14. “Nature seems to look after her own only up to a certain point; beyond that they are supposed to fend for themselves.”

— Hal Borland

15. “There it is, fog, atmospheric moisture still uncertain in destination, not quite weather and not altogether mood, yet partaking of both.”

— Hal Borland

16. “If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.”

— Hal Borland

17. “Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.”

— Hal Borland

18. “You fight dandelions all weekend, and late Monday afternoon there they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity.”

— Hal Borland

Featured in: Monday Quotes

19. “A frontier is never a place; it is a time and a way of life.”

— Hal Borland

20. “Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity; but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?”

— Hal Borland

21. “Nothing in nature is as simple as it sometimes seems when reduced to words.”

— Hal Borland

22. “A root, a stem, a leaf, some means of capturing sunlight and air and making food – in sum, a plant. The green substance of this earth, the chlorophyll, is all summed up in the plants. Without them we perish, all of us who are flesh and blood.”

— Hal Borland

23. “Time has its own dimensions, and neither the sun nor the clock can encompass them all.”

— Hal Borland

24. “Of all the seasons, autumn offers the most to man and requires the least of him.”

— Hal Borland

25. “July is a blind date with summer.”

— Hal Borland

26. “As I stood and watched the mists slowly rising this morning I wondered what view was more beautiful than this.”

— Hal Borland

27. “All walking is discovery. On foot we take the time to see things whole.”

— Hal Borland

28. “There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter. One is the January thaw. The other is the seed catalogues.”

— Hal Borland

29. “Any river is really the summation of the whole valley. To think of it as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part.”

— Hal Borland

30. “There is a leisure about walking, no matter what pace you set, that lets down the tension.”

— Hal Borland

31. “Listen to it, and you are hearing the mighty currents of the air rushing down the latitudes of the earth, currents from the Mackenzie and the Athabasca and the Saskatchewan, and from the prairies and the white Tundra. It is a homeless wind, forever on the move.”

— Hal Borland

32. “When legends die the dreams end. When the dreams end there is no more greatness.”

— Hal Borland

33. “To see a hillside white with dogwood bloom is to know a particular ecstasy of beauty, but to walk the gray Winter woods and find the buds which will resurrect that beauty in another May is to partake of continuity.”

— Hal Borland

34. “For the Fall of the year is more than three months bounded by an equinox and a solstice. It is a summing up without the finality of year’s end.”

— Hal Borland

35. “Consider the wheelbarrow. It may lack the grace of an airplane, the speed of an automobile, the initial capacity of a freight car, but its humble wheel marked out the path of what civilization we still have.”

— Hal Borland

36. “For anyone who lives in the oak-and-maple area of New England, there is a perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October.”

— Hal Borland

37. “The earth turns, and the seasons, and for all his pride and power man cannot temper the winds or change their course. They are the unseen tides that shape our days and our years.”

— Hal Borland

38. “Green, the color of growth, or surgent life, enwraps the land. New green, still as individual as the plants themselves. Cool green, which will merge as the weeks pass, the Summer comes, into a canopy of shade of busy chlorophyll.”

— Hal Borland

39. “The longer I live and the more I read, the more certain I become that the real poems about spring aren’t written on paper. They are written in the back pasture and the near meadow, and they are issued in a new revised edition every April.”

— Hal Borland

40. “If you ever wondered why fishing is probably the most popular sport in this country, watch that boy beside on the water and you will learn. If you are really perceptive you will. For he already knows that fishing is only one part fish.”

— Hal Borland

41. “Man is wise and constantly in quest of more wisdom; but the ultimate wisdom, which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed.”

— Hal Borland

42. “The ultimate wisdom which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls faith rather than reason.”

— Hal Borland

43. “The earth’s distances invite the eye. And as the eye reaches, so must the mind stretch to meet these new horizons. I challenge anyone to stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see a new expanse not only around him, but in him, too.”

— Hal Borland

44. “The owl, that bird of onomatopoetic name, is a repetitious question wrapped in feathery insulation especially for Winter delivery.”

— Hal Borland

45. “Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years.”

— Hal Borland

46. “He who walks may see and understand. You can study all America from one hilltop, if your eyes are open and your mind is willing to reach. But first you must walk to that hill.”

— Hal Borland

47. “For all his learning or sophistication, man still instinctively reaches towards that force beyond. Only arrogance can deny its existence, and the denial falters in the face of evidence on every hand. In every tuft of grass, in every bird, in every opening bud, there it is.”

— Hal Borland

48. “If the voice of the brook was not the first song of celebration, it must have been at least an obbligato for that event.”

— Hal Borland

49. “There are some things, but not too many, toward which the countryman knows he must be properly respectful if he would avoid pain, sickness and injury. Nature is neither punitive nor solicitous, but she has thorns and fangs as wells as bowers and grassy banks.”

— Hal Borland

50. “The most unhappy thing about conservation is that it is never permanent. Save a priceless woodland or an irreplaceable mountain today, and tomorrow it is threatened from another quarter.”

— Hal Borland