True praise roots and spreads. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Strait trees have crooked roots. [ Proverb ]

But should you lure
From his dark haunt, beneath the tangled roots
Of pendent trees, the monarch of the brook,
Behooves you then to ply your finest art. [ Thomson ]

Whose roots earth's centre touch, whose heads the skies. [ Walter Harte ]

Friendships begin with liking or gratitude - roots that can be pulled up. [ George Eliot ]

The roots of the deepest love die in the heart, if not tenderly cherished. [ Herder ]

Then kissed me hard, as if he plucked up kisses by the roots, that grew upon my lips. [ William Shakespeare ]

Religion is a higher and supernatural life, mystical in its roots and practical in its fruits. [ Amiel ]

Our ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots. [ Edward Bulwer Lytton ]

Mystic, deep as the world's centre, are the roots a man has struck into his native soil; no tree that grows is rooted so. [ Carlyle ]

Great acts grow out of great occasions, and great occasions spring from great principles, working changes in society and tearing it up by the roots. [ Hazlitt ]

Those who depend on the merits of their ancestors may be said to search in the roots of the tree for those fruits which the branches ought to produce. [ Barrow ]

Pride is like the beautiful acacia, that lifts its bead proudly above its neighbor plants - forgetting that it too, like them, has its roots in the dirt. [ Bovee ]

Mountains never shake hands.
Their roots may touch; they may keep together some way up; but at length they part company, and rise into individual, insulated peaks. So is it with great men. [ J. C. and A. W. Hare ]

Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained love will die at the roots. [ Hawthorne ]

Mountains never shake hands. Their roots may touch; they may keep company some way up; but at length they part company, and rise into individual, isolated peaks. So it is with great men. [ Hare ]

We adorn graves with flowers and redolent plants, just emblems of the life of man, which has been compared in the Holy Scriptures to those fading beauties whose roots, being buried in dishonor, rise again in glory. [ Evelyn ]

Alchemy may be compared to the man who told his sons he had left them gold buried somewhere in his vineyard; where they by digging found no gold, but by turning up the mould, about the roots of their vines, procured a plentiful vintage. So the search and endeavors to make gold have brought many useful inventions and instructive experiments to light. [ Bacon ]