A Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?
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It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The acorn of ambition often grows into an oak from which men hang.
The boughs of the oak are roaring inside the acorn.
A potential person is not a person, any more than an acorn is an oak tree. I don't think women should have to give birth just because a sperm met an egg.
You cannot plant an acorn in the morning, and expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of an oak.
The acorn of honest inquiry has often sprouted and matured into a great oak of understanding.
The tallest oak tree once was an acorn that any pig could have swallowed.
The willow which bends to the tempest often escapes better than the oak which resists it.
The mind has grown to its present state of consciousness as an acorn grows into an oak, or as saurians developed into mammals.
Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it.
The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character.
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