A Quote by Alan Watts

It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.

Alan Watts

Quote Topics

Acorn Implied It Takes Time Oak Takes Time Turn

Quote Author

Alan Watts
English - Philosopher
January 6, 1915 - November 16, 1973

Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak.

George R. R. Martin

What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.

Philip Roth

Organic growth is a cyclical process; it is just as true to say that the oak is a potential acorn as it is to say the acorn is a potential oak. But the process of writing a poem, of making any art object, is not cyclical but a motion in one direction toward a definite end.

W. H. Auden

We are, in a certain way, defined as much by our potential as by its expression. There is a great difference between an acorn and a little bit of wood carved into an acorn shape, a difference not always readily apparent to the naked eye. The difference is there even if the acorn never has the opportunity to plant itself and become an oak. Remembering its potential changes the way in which we think of the acorn and react to it. How we value it. If an acorn were conscious, knowing its potential would change the way that it might think and feel about itself.

Rachel Naomi Remen

I think character never changes; the Acorn becomes an Oak, which is very little like an Acorn to be sure, but it never becomes an Ash.

Hester Lynch Piozzi

The boughs of the oak are roaring inside the acorn.

Charles Tomlinson

Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The acorn of ambition often grows into an oak from which men hang.

H. Rider Haggard

You cannot plant an acorn in the morning, and expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of an oak.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The acorn of honest inquiry has often sprouted and matured into a great oak of understanding.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf

The tallest oak tree once was an acorn that any pig could have swallowed.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The mind has grown to its present state of consciousness as an acorn grows into an oak, or as saurians developed into mammals.

Carl Jung

The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn, the bird waits in the egg, and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.