Top 90 Hope Jahren Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People are like plants: they grow toward the light.”

— Hope Jahren

2. “He taught me that there is no shame in breaking something, only in not being able to fix it.”

— Hope Jahren

3. “A seed is alive while it waits. Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it. Neither the seed nor the old oak is growing; they are both just waiting. Their waiting differs, however, in that the seed is waiting to flourish while the tree is only waiting to die.”

— Hope Jahren

4. “Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.”

— Hope Jahren

5. “An effort tempered by humility will go much further than one armored with righteousness.”

— Hope Jahren

6. “Eventually it will require more nutrients to maintain the branches and roots that do not grow quite far out enough to capture those nutrients. Once it exceeds the limitations of its environment, it loses all. And this is why you must trim a tree periodically in order to preserve it.”

— Hope Jahren

7. “Ask a science professor what she worries about. It won’t take long. She’ll look you in the eye and say one word: “Money.”

— Hope Jahren

8. “We are strong and lucky. Our planet is home to many who struggle to survive on too little. The fact that we are of the group with food, shelter, and clean water obligates us not to give up on the world that we have compromised. Knowledge is responsibility.”

— Hope Jahren

9. “Because – as Marge Piercy first said – both life and love are like butter and do not keep: they both have to be made fresh every day.”

— Hope Jahren

10. “Standing within a peat bog in Dingle, you can’t help wondering what Ireland was like before you and the other primates scrambled up upon its shores. When viewed from space, did it glow like a furry emerald within a sea of blue, the terrestrial equivalent of a massive marine plankton bloom? We.”

— Hope Jahren

11. “Something so hard can be so easy if you just have a little help. In the right place, under the right conditions, you can finally stretch out into what you’re supposed to be.”

— Hope Jahren

12. “Love and learning are similar in that they can never be wasted.”

— Hope Jahren

13. “Even if you consider yourself on the right side of environmental issues and a true believer in climate change, chances are that you are actively degrading the earth as much as, or more than, the people you argue with. An effort tempered by humility will go much further than one armored with righteousness.”

— Hope Jahren

14. “Working in the hospital teaches you that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the sick and the not sick. If you are not sick, shut up and help.”

— Hope Jahren

15. “Nothing in these growth curves tells us what a tree should look like, only what trees have looked like. Every plant must find its own unique path to maturity. There.”

— Hope Jahren

16. “It takes a long time to turn into what you’re supposed to be.”

— Hope Jahren

17. “A plant that lives where it should not is simply a pest, but a plant that thrives where it should not live is a weed. We don’t resent the audacity of the weed, as every seed is audacious; we resent its fantastic success. Humans are actively creating a world where only weeds can live and then feigning shock and outrage upon finding so many.”

— Hope Jahren

18. “Working in the hospital teaches you that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the sick and the not sick. If you are not sick, shut up and help. Twenty-five years later, I still cannot reject this as an inaccurate worldview.”

— Hope Jahren

19. “Every piece of wood in your house – from the windowsills to the furniture to the rafters – was once part of a living being, thriving in the open and pulsing with sap. If you look at these wooden objects across the grain, you might be able to trace out the boundaries of a couple of rings. The delicate shape of those lines tells you the story of a couple of years. If you know how to listen, each ring describes how the rain fell and the wind blew and the sun appeared every day at dawn.”

— Hope Jahren

20. “How the coming of the dusk dissolves the laces of the splint that holds you together during the day, and the desperate sadness that follows can be anesthetized only with sleep. The heaviness of opening your eyes the next morning when you realize that you’ve begun another day of grief, so pervasive that it removes even the taste from the food that you eat.”

— Hope Jahren

21. “Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life. It has also convinced me that carefully writing everything down is the only real defense we have against forgetting something important that once was and is no more, including the spruce tree that should have outlived me but did not.”

— Hope Jahren

22. “My desire to become a scientist was founded upon a deep instinct and nothing more; I never heard a single story about a living female scientist, never met one or even saw one on television. As.”

— Hope Jahren

23. “My true potential had more to do with my willingness to struggle than with my past and present circumstances.”

— Hope Jahren

24. “In my own small experience, sexism has been something very simple: the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can’t possibly be what you are.”

— Hope Jahren

25. “Why are they together, the tree and the fungus? We don’t know. The fungus could certainly live very well alone almost anywhere, but it chooses to entwine itself with the tree over an easier and more independent life. It has adapted to seek the rush of pure sweetness that comes directly from a plant root, such a strange and concentrated compound, unlike anything to be found elsewhere in the forest. And perhaps the fungus can somehow sense that when it is part of a symbiosis, it is also not alone.”

— Hope Jahren

26. “People don’t know to make a leaf, but they know how to destroy one.”

— Hope Jahren

27. “Ireland is so saturated with green that it’s the things that not green catch one’s eye: the roads, walls, shorelines, even sheep, seem to have been placed as contrast, strategically positioned to organize the vast expansion of green... In Ireland, you can bask in fact that you have been benevolently outnumbered by these first and better life forms. Standing in a peat bog in Dingle, you can not help wondering what Ireland was like before you and other primates scrambled upon its shore.”

— Hope Jahren

28. “My mother taught me that reading is a kind of work, and that every paragraph merits exertion, and in this way, I learned how to absorb difficult books. Soon after I went to kindergarten, however, I learned that reading difficult books also brings trouble. I was punished for reading ahead of the class, for being unwilling to speak and act “nicely.” I didn’t know why I simultaneously feared and adored my female teachers, but I did know that I needed their attention.”

— Hope Jahren

29. “Did the very first flowers make the dinosaurs sneeze?”

— Hope Jahren

30. “I wanted to be studying plant growth, but science for war will always pay better than science for knowledge.”

— Hope Jahren

31. “It is easy to become besotted with a willow. The Rapunzel of the plant world, this tree appears as a graceful princess bowed down by her lush tresses, waiting on the riverbank for someone just like you to come along and keep her company.”

— Hope Jahren

32. “What if you don’t get a grant? You can’t exactly pay me less than you do now, in case you haven’t run the numbers lately. What if you get fired? We’ve got the goddamn keys to the place; I’ll go make copies tomorrow. I’ve developed a nagging suspicion that you don’t have to be employed here to come in and work every day.”

— Hope Jahren

33. “I used to pray to be made stronger; now I pray to be made grateful. Every.”

— Hope Jahren

34. “America says it loves science, but it sure as hell doesn’t want to pay for it.”

— Hope Jahren

35. “All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf.”

— Hope Jahren

36. “Don’t be fooled by the few red or brown leaves you find on poison ivy in the fall – the plant is not dying; it’s just cheating with different pigments.”

— Hope Jahren

37. “Public and private organizations all over the world have studied the mechanics of sexism within science and have concluded that they are complex and multifactorial. In my own small experience, sexism has been something very simple: the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can’t possibly be what you are.”

— Hope Jahren

38. “These plants know that when your world is changing rapidly, it is important to have identified the one thing that you can always count upon.”

— Hope Jahren

39. “So humor me for a minute, and look out your window. What did you see?”

— Hope Jahren

40. “I know damn well that if there had been a way to get to success without traveling through disaster someone would have already done it and thus rendered the experiments unnecessary, but there’s still no journal where I can tell the story of how my science is done with both the heart and the hands. Eventually.”

— Hope Jahren

41. “My strongest memory of our garden is not how it smelled, or even looked, but how it sounded.”

— Hope Jahren

42. “Being paid to wonder seems like a heavy responsibility at times.”

— Hope Jahren

43. “It’s inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling thoughts of leaves. A.”

— Hope Jahren

44. “Dung beetles follow the Milky Way; the Cataglyphis desert ant dead-reckons by counting its paces; monarch butterflies, on their thousand-mile, multigenerational flight from Mexico to the Rocky Mountains, calculate due north using the position of the sun, which requires accounting for the time of day, the day of the year, and latitude; honeybees, newts, spiny lobsters, sea turtles, and many others read magnetic fields. – Kim Tingley, The Secrets of the Wave Pilots.”

— Hope Jahren

45. “I navigated the confusing and unstable path of being what you are while knowing that it’s more than people want to see. Back.”

— Hope Jahren

46. “Instead, I would take a long, lonely journey toward adulthood with the dogged faith of the pioneer who has realized that there is no promised land but still holds out hope that the destination will be someplace better than here. On.”

— Hope Jahren

47. “Like anyone else who harbors precious secrets wrought from years of searching, I have longed for someone to tell.”

— Hope Jahren

48. “My lab is a place where my guilt over what I haven’t done is supplanted by all of the things that I am getting done. My uncalled parents, unpaid credit cards, unwashed dishes, and unshaved legs pale in comparison to the noble breakthrough under pursuit. My lab is a place where I can be the child that I still am.”

— Hope Jahren

49. “It turns out that there is no “right” or “wrong” way to grow into a hundred-year-old tree: there are only ways that work and ways that do not.”

— Hope Jahren

50. “A new mind-set became imperative:.”

— Hope Jahren