49 Wood Quotes Honoring Our Most Popular Building Material

These wood quotes will have you celebrating earth’s most popular building material.

There is something inherently special about wood.

Whether it is the strength of a redwood or cedar or the beautiful color and texture of oak, we have had a love affair with wood for a very long time.

Tell us your favorite type of wood in the comment section below.

What are the benefits of reading these wood quotes?

Cultures across the world all turn to wood to meet their needs.

Famed British furniture maker David Linley once opined, “Wood is very warm and sensual and meant to be touched.”

Some say there are two types of people in this world: Those who respect wood and those who do not.

Wood has been one of humanity’s most generous and plentiful natural resources since our earliest days as a species.

We use wood for our:

• furniture
• homes
• transportation
• tools
• education
• food consumption
• money

We have used wood to heat our homes and cook our food for generations.

You will also enjoy our article on bench quotes.

Top 10 wood quotes

1. “A tree’s wood is also its memoir.” — Hope Jahren

2. “Well tended garden is better than a neglected wood lot.” — Dixie Lee Ray

3. “Wood is very warm and sensual and meant to be touched.” — David Linley

4. “Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.” — Annie Dillard

5. “Remember, a chip on the shoulder is a sure sign of wood higher up.” — Brigham Young

6. “Everybody’s seen a stream or a wood they knew replaced by a strip mall.” — Tom Scholz

7. “From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.” — Immanuel Kant

8. “Sometimes it’s best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees.” — Howard Jacobson

9. “When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.” — Alice Oswald

10. “I don’t like things that can be reproduced. Wood isn’t important in itself but rather in the fact that objects made in it are unique, simple, unpretentious.” — Georg Baselitz

Thoughtful woodworking quotes

11. “I like to work a lot with wood. I make furniture that falls apart. I also sew.” — Tim Conway

12. “Bent metal is worse than bent wood, and weight for weight is more flexible.” — Lawrence Hargrave

13. “Woodworking requires a completely different kind of thinking and problem-solving ability than writing.” — Joshua Foer

14. “Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

15. “Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both, you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.” — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

16. “I’m a very compulsive person, so I spend most of my time drawing or writing my diary, patching things up, and carving bits of wood – I’ve carved two of my guitars.” — Lou Doillon

17. “I always said that if I could just find a guy who could chop wood and had a nice smile, it wouldn’t bother me if he was a thug or an aristocrat, as long as he was a good guy. And I’ve ended up with an educated thug.” — Sade Adu

18. “With writing, you take a set of facts and ideas, and you reason your way forward to a story that pulls them together. With woodworking, you start with an end product in mind and reason your way backward to the raw wood.” — Joshua Foer

19. “Just as our ancient ancestors drew animals on cave walls and carved animals from wood and bone, we decorate our homes with animal prints and motifs, give our children stuffed animals to clutch, cartoon animals to watch, animal stories to read.” — Diane Ackerman

20. “I will never tire of recommending the custom, practiced by the best architects, of preparing not only drawings and sketches but also models of wood or any other material. These… enable us to examine… the work as a whole… and, before continuing any further, to estimate the likely trouble and expense.” – Leon Battista Alberti

You will also enjoy our article on axe quotes.

Wood quotes about chopping wood

21. “I’m a fan of parchment and wood pulp.” — Daniel Clowes

22. “Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing.” — Annie Dillard

23. “People love chopping wood. In this activity, one immediately sees results.” — Albert Einstein

24. “There’s something so empowering about knowing I can pick up an ax and split a piece of wood.” — Rain Dove

25. “Sometimes there is nothing that gives me the contentment that sawing a piece of wood does.” — Abbas Kiarostami

26. “I get up every morning and chop wood, and I pretty much do it seven days a week, and I like to do it.” — James Patterson

27. “The greatest thing my father left me was a love for cutting wood – my love for sawing, especially pine wood.” — David Lynch

28. “I had to learn how to chop wood actually, I don’t think my dad would have let me go chop wood in the backyard growing up.” — Jennifer Lawrence

29. “I love weights, but it’s too far to get to the gym. So I make the farm my gym: I split wood and haul tires and do work on the farm, and that’s sort of my weight training portion.” — Ann Bancroft

30. “Harvesting the biosphere is still the most fundamental human activity. Without that, everybody’s dead, really. We could do quite well without microchips or the business site of ‘Atlantic Monthly,’ the gated communities, Guccis, and high-growth GDP. But we cannot do without harvesting the crops and cutting down the wood.” — Vaclav Smil

Wood burning and other wood quotes

31. “It all comes down to the density of the wood. Every guitar’s different.” — Robin Trower

32. “By means of tracing paper, I transfer my design to the wood and draw on that.” — John Tenniel

33. “Wood pellet grilling could potentially have a lower risk of cancer when compared to other forms of grilling.” — Homaro Cantu

34. “The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

35. “Unlike charcoal grills, which take up to 30 minutes or more to heat up, wood pellet grills can give off an even heat quite quickly.” — Homaro Cantu

36. “And, unlike propane grills which heat up quickly but lack flavor, foods cooked on pellet grills are rich in smokiness and succulence.” — Homaro Cantu

37. “No one should be allowed to make music as if he were made of wood. One must reproduce the musical text exactly, but not play like a stone.” — Olivier Messiaen

38. “Wood doesn’t steal energy from your body the way glass and concrete steal heat. When it’s hot, a wood house feels cooler than a concrete one, and when it’s cold, the other way around.” — Peter Zumthor

39. “Shields were generally made of wood, covered with leather, or some similar substance. To secure them, in some sort, from being cut through by the sword, they were surrounded with a hoop of metal.” — Thomas Bulfinch

40. “We live in such a consumer-based world. Everything we do, someone else has provided for us, so there is something really empowering about knowing that once I have found the right pieces of wood, I can start a fire and keep myself warm and skin an animal to eat and make its skin into leather.” — Neil Jackson

Wood quotes about life

41. “I like a man who can build things. Whittle me something out of wood, and I’m sold.” — Rachel Bilson

42. “There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.” — Jean Cocteau

43. “A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.” — Franz Kafka

44. “I like very masculine smells. I like wood scents on men. I just like a man to smell great, but I don’t like very strong cologne.” — Jessica White

45. “You feel a certain way in a glass or concrete or limestone building. It has an effect on your skin – the same with plywood or veneer, or solid timber.” — Peter Zumthor

46. “A lot of designers still have nostalgia for the past. As for the furniture in the future, I hope they use less of real wood. Conservation in wood is necessary.” — Elsa Peretti

47. “We prefer synthetic rather than natural materials. Natural products are almost too valuable. Wood is much harder to produce than metal. And metal is recyclable, while wood isn’t.” — Helmut Jahn

48. “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery

49. “My father, who was a cabinetmaker, told me, ‘Wood has a grain, and if you go into the grain, you have beauty. If you go against it, you have splinters – it breaks.’ And I took that as my view of life. You have to follow the grain – to be sensitive to the direction of life.” — Christian Louboutin

How does wood make you feel?

What is it about wood that makes us feel so connected to it?

Perhaps it is the eons of time humanity has spent working with the versatile natural resource.

Wood is a gift from the earth that allows us to work with it, creating various tools and other necessities.

We can use it to reshape our reality and the world.

Think about it, can you name another activity that is as immediately gratifying as chopping wood?

Albert Einstein himself once observed that “People love chopping wood. In this activity, one immediately sees results.”

Unfortunately, we have taken our wood resources for granted.

Trees are being cut down at more alarming rates than ever, and more often than not, new seedlings are not planted to replace the ones cut down.

Wood is a finite resource.

We can easily overuse it and run out of it if we do not manage it wisely.

Tell us which wood quote resonated most with you in the comment section below.

If you feel inspired to buy a wood pellet grill, check out this one!