A Quote by W. H. Auden

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

Quote Topics

Acorn Any Art Cyclical Definite Direction End Growth Just Making Motion Oak Object One Direction Organic Poem Potential Process Say Toward True Writing

Quote Author

W. H. Auden
English - Poet
February 21, 1907 - September 29, 1973

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

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

Alan Watts

When we say we have patterns, there is a cyclical movement to everything. Our psychological and emotional processes also have become cyclical largely because of a very strong attachment and involvement with physical process, and physical process has to be cyclical; only then we exist. Without out cyclical movement there'll be no physical existence.

Jaggi Vasudev

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

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

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.

Katha Pollitt

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

As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Arthur Schopenhauer

The boughs of the oak are roaring inside the acorn.

Charles Tomlinson

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

Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it.

Hope Jahren

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I can see in the acorn the oak tree. I see the growth, the rebuilding, the restoring. I see that is the American psyche. There is so much we can draw understanding from. One of the lessons is the development of courage. Because without courage, you can't practice any of the other virtues consistently.