A Quote by Hannah Whitall Smith

Before the acorn can bring forth the oak, it must become itself a wreck. No plant ever came from any but a wrecked seed.

Hannah Whitall Smith

Quote Topics

Acorn Any Become Before Bring Came Ever Forth Itself Must Oak Plant Seed Wreck Wrecked

Quote Author

Hannah Whitall Smith
American - Author
February 7, 1832 - May 1, 1911

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

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

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

Alan Watts

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

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

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"What is a human being, then?" "A seed." "A... seed?" "An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree."

David Zindell

I trust and believe that this College, this seed that we have sown, will grow to shelter and nurture generations who may add most notably to the strength and happiness of our people, and to the knowledge and peaceful progress of the world. 'The mighty oak from an acorn towers; A tiny seed can fill a field with flowers.'

Winston Churchill

Every noble achievement is a dream before it is a reality just as the oak is an acorn before it is a tree.

Patience Strong

In any case, if I grow hybrid maize or hybrid pearl mallet or any hybrid, I have to sow fresh seed every year. I cannot keep the seed of the same plant. If I keep the seed of the same plant, yield will be much less and there will be a wide variation in the field, like maturity period, quality and so on.

M. S. Swaminathan

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

That one plant should be sown and another be produced cannot happen; whatever seed is sown, a plant of that kind even comes forth.

Guru Nanak

Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up. The earth must be broken to bring forth life. If the seed does not die there is no plant. Bread results from the death of wheat. Life lives on lives. Our own life lives on the acts of other people. If you are lifeworthy, you can take it.