Quotes & Sayings About Acorns

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

Had the Battle of Franklin ever really ended? Carrie walked her cemetery, and around her the wounds closed up and scarred over, but only in that way that an oak struck by lightning heals itself by twisting and bending around the wound: it is still recognizably a tree, it still lives as a tree, it still puts out its leaves and acorns, but its center, hidden deep within the curtain of green, remains empty and splintered where it hasn't been grotesquely scarred over. We are happy the tree hasn't died, and from the proper angle we can look on it and suppose that it is the same tree as it ever was, but it is not and never will be. — Robert Hicks

Genius unexecuted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks. — Orison Swett Marden

The ditch once covered over, above it acorns shall be strewn, in order that the spot become green again, and the copse grown back thick over it, the traces of my grave may disappear from the face of the earth as I trust the memory of me shall fade out of the minds of all men save nevertheless for those few who in their goodness have loved me until the last and of whom I carry away a sweet remembrance with me to the grave.
Last Will and Testament (1806) — Marquis De Sade

I get hoes like acorns falling out of trees. — Master P

O ye whose years unfolding fair Are fresh with youth, and free from care, Should vice and indolence desire The garden of your souls to hire, No parleys hold-reject the suit, Nor let one seed the soil pollute. My child their first approach beware, With firmness break the insidious snare, Lest as the acorns grew and throve Into a sun-encircled grove, Thy sins, a dark o'ershadowing tree Shut out the light of Heaven from thee. — Lydia Sigourney

Eventually, even a blind squirell will find an acorn. — Jim Cornette

The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by
their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to
have been cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise Solomon prescribed
ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman praetors have
decided how often you may go into your neighbor's land to gather the
acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that
neighbor." Hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut our
nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor
longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have
exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man's
capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can
do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy
failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to
thee what thou hast left undone? — Henry David Thoreau

The boughs of the oak are roaring inside the acorn. — Charles Tomlinson

Think of all the mesquite in Texas, the pinyon pines, the acorns in Appalachia, every place has the possibility of mass production. It's an infrastructural system so nestled in ecology, it's a more beautiful ecology. — Joel Salatin

What but education has advanced us beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbors? And what chains them to their present state of barbarism and wretchedness but a bigoted veneration for the supposed superlative wisdom of their fathers and the preposterous idea that they are to look backward for better things and not forward, longing, as it should seem, to return to the days of eating acorns and roots rather than indulge in the degeneracies of civilization? — Thomas Jefferson

Each human being is bred with a unique set of potentials that yearn to be fulfilled as surely as the acorn yearns to become the oak within it. — Aristotle.

Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees. — E.F. Schumacher

Planting nuts requires a vision for a future that goes beyond one's mortal reach. If we envision ourselves as participants in the same grand, complex web of interactions as the forest, then planting acorns is like planting part of ourselves. The morality that comes from such a vision of ecosystem-as-life is a common thread that, if taught and encouraged, could unite all of mankind. — Bernd Heinrich

What of miniature boats constructed of birch bark and fallen leaves, launched onto cold water clear as air? How many fleets were pushed out toward the middles of ponds or sent down autumn brooks, holding treasures of acorns, or black feathers, or a puzzled mantis? Let those grassy crafts be listed alongside the iron hulls that cleave the sea, for they are all improvisations built from the daydreams of men, and all will perish, whether from the ocean siege or October breeze. — Paul Harding

An optimist is a man who plant two acorns and buy a hammock. — Jean De Lattre De Tassigny

I devoured hot-dogs in Baltimore 'way back in 1886, and they were then very far from newfangled ... They contained precisely the same rubber, indigestible pseudo-sausages that millions of Americans now eat, and they leaked the same flabby, puerile mustard. Their single point of difference lay in the fact that their covers were honest German Wecke made of wheat-flour baked to crispiness, and not the soggy rolls prevailing today, of ground acorns, plaster-of-Paris, flecks of bath-sponge, and atmospheric air all compact. — H.L. Mencken

No-one wants acorns, but everyone wants oaks. — Steve Fowler

Remember the acorn;
It does not devour other acorns. — Edgar Lee Masters

Big streams from little fountains flow. Great oaks from little acorns grow; — E.D.E.N. Southworth

It's just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus; All year long the grasshopper kept burying acorns for winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. Then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns and also he got a race car. Is any of this getting through to you? — Billy West

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

Embryos turn into babies; buds turn into blossoms; acorns turn into oak trees. The same programming that exists in them exists in each of us - to manifest our highest potential. What is the difference between those things and us? That we can say no ... So today, say yes. — Marianne Williamson

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

Or is it this: To feed on the acorns and grass of knowledge, and for the sake of truth to suffer hunger in one's soul? — Friedrich Nietzsche

You look different now. Like a proper little girl."
"I look like an oak tree, with all these stupid acorns."
"Nice, though. A nice oak tree. — George R R Martin

Big oaks grow from small acorns, and activity is a precursor to accomplishment. You don't think yourself into success. — Mark Sanborn

We sometimes meet uncivil men, children of Amazons, who dwell by mountain paths, and are said to be inhospitable to strangers; whose salutation is as rude as the grasp of their brawny hands, and who deal with men as unceremoniously as they are wont to deal with the elements. They need only extend their clearings, and let in more sunlight, to seek out the southern slopes of the hills, from which they may look down on the civil plain or ocean, and temper their diet duly with the cereal fruits, consuming less wild meat and acorns, to become like the inhabitants of cities. — Henry David Thoreau

There are useful herbs growing near the oak tree by the stream," Flamepaw pointed out "Littlecloud would come for these" his tail curled up in amusement "Then we could pelt Blackfoot with acorns and he'd think they came from StarClan — Erin Hunter

Pepper woke up thinking of butts.
And nothing else.
Ladies' butts.
Skinny butts, big butts, saddlebag butts, flabby and firm butts, the kind that sit so high they seem like part of the woman's back, the kind that ride low and form a UU just above the thighs like in the old television commercials for Hanes Underalls, butts that wiggle and butts that jiggle, sagging butts and robust butts, butts that hardly make an impression under a pair of jeans; sidewinder butts and trumpet butts
the ones so meaty they actually spread out until they appear to be a woman's thighs (ass so fat you can see it from the front), butts as knotty as acorns, butts as smooth as a slice of Gouda, butts with pimples and butts with cellulite, the kind that have pockmarks or red splotches, butts with tattoos and butts with bullet scars. Butts you can cup in your warm hands. Butts and butts and butts.
In other words, Pepper woke up horny. — Victor LaValle

All winter the acorns and red Maple leaf moldered in silence - in the same way grief is gnawing at me - slowly, imperceptibly ... consuming ... — John Geddes

I'm nineteen tree rings and mashed acorns stop up my veins when I can't clot. Oh god, you beautiful person, I'll let you lick the salt off of my tattoos as if they were wounds, wounds made of ink and stories. — Taylor Rhodes

Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war? We can hide our provisions and run into the woods; then you will starve for wronging your friends. Why are you jealous of us? We are unarmed, and willing to give you what you ask, if you come in a friendly manner, and not so simple as not to know that it is much better to eat good meat, sleep comfortably, live quietly with my wives and children, laugh and be merry with the English, and trade for their copper and hatchets, than to run away from them, and to lie cold in the woods, feed on acorns, roots and such trash, and be so hunted that I can neither eat nor sleep. In these wars, my men must sit up watching, and if a twig break, they all cry out "Here comes Captain Smith!" So I must end my miserable life. Take away your guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy, or you may all die in the same manner. — Howard Zinn

Heritage breeds, with or without Chinese "blood," are threatened primarily because they are not suitable for the ultraintensive farming practices that predominate in the West today. Generally, they don't grow fast enough for factory farming, or they require too much space and resources. The Iberico, for example, needs about an acre of oak woodland (called dehesa forest) per pig to supply the acorns for its famous hams.35 — Anonymous

Only something as insane as human beings would ever asked themselves if 'I'm good.' You don't find oak trees having existential crisis. 'I feel so rotten about myself. I don't produce as much acorns as the one next to me.' — Adyashanti

Typewriters and computers were not designed with steep mountain slopes in mind. On one occasion last autumn I did carry my typewriter into the garden, and I am still trying to extricate a couple of acorns from under the keys, while the roller seems permanently stained from some fine yellow pollen dust from the deodar trees. But armed with pencils and paper, I can lie on the grass and write for hours. Provided there are a couple of cheese-and-tomato sandwiches within easy reach. — Ruskin Bond

In many ways a child has actually re-educated the parents upon arrival into their lives - when else do adults take the time to appreciate acorns or clouds? — Ian-Anthony Finnimore

Ideas are fruits of your thinking. But they've got to be harnessed and put to work to have value.
Each year an oak tree produces enough acorns to populate a good-size forest. Yet from these bushels of seeds perhaps only one or two acorns will become a tree. The Squirrels destroy most of them, and the hard ground beneath the tree doesn't give the few remaining seeds much chance for a start. So it is with ideas. Very few bear fruit. Ideas are highly perishable. If we're not on guard, the squirrels (negative-thinking people) will destroy most of them. Ideas require special handling from the time they are born until they're transformed into practical ways for doing things better. — David J. Schwartz

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. — Richard Hamming

Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, water lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of education. — Luther Burbank

It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak. — Betsy Lerner

Grandma told me not to 'squirrel' you...

She and Anne saw two squirrels doing the deed, then the male squirrel ran off when it was over. I'm slightly offended she compared me to a hit-and-run rodent. I just want you to know that I want to share my branch and acorns with you, it's not just physical. — Robin Alexander

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze. — Thomas Carlyle

No oak trees without acorns' may be a formally true proposition, but that this acorn did in fact produce this oak tree, there and then, is not a teleological necessity; it is a circumstantial occurrence" (OH 104-5). Because history is what happened, not what must have happened, there is no room in an authentic historical explanation for teleological causes. — Terry Nardin

Sometimes big trees grow out of acorns - I think I heard that from a squirrel. — Jerry Coleman

How could I explain the sort of twisted fantasies I'd had to play out to Frank? Most of them I didn't even understand myself. Like being drenched in maple syrup and having acorns thrown at me by a guy wearing nothing but hiking boots. — Nicole Castle

An acorn would never brag about giving shade. — Tim Cook

Home is a room dappled with firelight: there are pictures and books. And when the rain sighs, and the acorns fall, there are patterns of leaves against the drawn curtains. Home is where I was safe. Home is what I fled from. — Mervyn Peake

Each pregnant Oak ten thousand acorns forms
Profusely scatter'd by autumnal storms;
Ten thousand seeds each pregnant poppy sheds
Profusely scatter'd from its waving heads;
The countless Aphides, prolific tribe,
With greedy trunks the honey'd sap imbibe;
Swarm on each leaf with eggs or embryons big,
And pendent nations tenant every twig ...
- All these, increasing by successive birth,
Would each o'erpeople ocean, air, and earth.
So human progenies, if unrestrain'd,
By climate friended, and by food sustain'd,
O'er seas and soils, prolific hordes! would spread
Erelong, and deluge their terraqueous bed;
But war, and pestilence, disease, and dearth,
Sweep the superfluous myriads from the earth ...
The births and deaths contend with equal strife,
And every pore of Nature teems with Life;
Which buds or breathes from Indus to the Poles,
And Earth's vast surface kindles, as it rolls! — Erasmus Darwin

After all, what is man but a hoard of ghosts? Oaks, that were acorns, that were oaks ... — Walter De La Mare

Trent pumped his arm as if he'd just hit the jackpot. "Thank God. If I had to hear about one more incident with that squirrel-shifter, I was going to shoot myself."
"Squirrel-shifter? Are you fucking kidding me?" Jace raised an eyebrow in a look that said, Do I even want to know?
"Some half squirrel, half man has been showing up naked in people's backyards out in the suburbs. Soccer moms tend to be a little alarmed when a nude man nibbling on acorns is perched near their child's window. I'm not sure whether he's a shifter who's unable to hold his animal form for long or just a garden variety nut. — Kait Ballenger

Acorns were good until bread was found. — Francis Bacon

You cannot plant an acorn in the morning, and expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of an oak. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

It's fine if you aren't into rubbing acorns or turning in circles before you create, but the brain is nothing if not responsive to familiar stimuli. Creating — Todd Brison

How lucky country children are in these natural delights that lie ready to their hand! Every season and every plant offers changing joys. As they meander along the lane that leads to our school all kinds of natural toys present themselves for their diversion. The seedpods of stitchwort hang ready for delightful popping between thumb and finger, and later the bladder campion offers a larger, if less crisp, globe to burst. In the autumn, acorns, beechnuts, and conkers bedizen their path, with all their manifold possibilities of fun. In the summer, there is an assortment of honeys to be sucked from bindweed flowers, held fragile and fragrant to hungry lips, and the tiny funnels of honeysuckle and clover blossoms to taste. — Miss Read

The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog's gonna root up an acorn once in a while. — Edward Abbey

Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It quickly became apparent that the Germans were interested in using our strength but not in preserving it. We received a ration of "flower coffee" - made not from coffee beans but from flowers, or maybe acorns. We each had half a loaf of bread, which had to last us from Sunday to Wednesday. At midday, we had a cold soup made from broken asparagus that couldn't be sold, or a mustard soup with potatoes, and maybe a hard-boiled egg. At night, we had a milk soup; on lucky days, it contained some oatmeal. — Edith Hahn Beer

An optimist is a man who plants two acorns and buys a hammock. — Jean De Lattre De Tassigny

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
You've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feathers a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns. — Adam Zagajewski

At this time in his life Zinkoff sees no difference between the stars in the sky and the stars in his mother's plastic Baggie. He believes that stars fall from the sky sometimes, and that his mother goes around collecting them like acorns. He believes she has to use heavy gloves and dark sunglasses because the fallen stars are so hot and shiny. She puts them in the freezer for forty-five minutes, and when they come out they are flat and silver and sticky on the back and ready for his shirts. — Jerry Spinelli

This may not however elevate your stature during the years you have remaining; for fame's a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels and plant acorns. — Neal Stephenson

A ghost curled like a blue snail inside her chest, and it was so tiny! It burned through the lace of her old-fashioned dress like a second heart. A musical staff wound in a thorny crown around the Spiritist's forehead, so that notes ran down her cheeks in a loose mask of song. Her eyelids were blacked out
and I saw this again and again in nightmares about my sister. Her eyelids had the polish of acorns. But her ears: that was the truly scary part. Great fantails of indigo and violet lights spiraled into her earlobes in an ethereal funnel
what the book called the Inverted Borealis. The caption read: 'A ghost sings its way deeply inside the Spiritist. — Karen Russell

Oak trees come out of acorns, no matter how unlikely that seems. An acorn is just a tree's way back into the ground. For another try. Another trip through. One life for another. — Shirley Ann Grau

If you don't have courage, you can't practice any of the other virtues. — Tavis Smiley

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

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

She felt as buoyantly patriotic as her Chechen classmates who could trace their family trees back to the acorns — Anthony Marra

I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons. — Shirley Jackson

Great oaks grow from little acorns. He has a green thumb. He has green fingers. He's sowing his wild oats. Here Ceres' gifts in waving prospect stand, And nodding tempt the joyful reaper's hand. — Alexander Pope

There was a small knothole in one of the boards, and Coraline spent an afternoon dropping pebbles and acorns through the hole and waiting, and counting, until she heard the plop as they hit the water. — Neil Gaiman

You know, I never imagined there were he-dryads. Not even in an oak tree."
One of the giants grinned at him.
Druellae snorted. "Stupid! Where do you think acorns come from? — Terry Pratchett

All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity. The — Nathaniel Hawthorne

If acorns start growing into theologians, or if women begin turning into pillars of salt, then we may wish to hypothesize about a supernatural influence. But until such time as nature becomes hopelessly unintelligible and unpredictable, we need look no further than nature itself for explanations. — George H. Smith

He can climb anything lightning fast and is the king of the forest insofar as using the canopy as a highway. While his favorite food is voles, caught on the floors of forest and meadow, he much enjoys squirrels of all kinds and is the only hunter of squirrels who can follow them to the highest, thinnest branches; not even the fisher, eing heavier, can achieve that dangerous elevation. He eats everything else he can find, of course, but given his druthers, like today's late-summer bounty, he would have a vole for breakfast and then some thimbleberries and a cricket as a midmorning snack and then another vole for late lunch, followed by huckleberries in the afternoon, most of a dead White-crowned sparrow, some early white-oak acorns...and then, delightfully a young flying squirrel... — Brian Doyle

Even the men most richly endowed with ability, education, and opportunity, even the giants of the race, after the completest life possible, feel, as they stand on the edge of the grave, that they are but human acorns with all their possibilities still in them, just beginning to sprout. — Orison Swett Marden

October arrives in a swirl of fragrant blue leaf smoke, the sweetness of slightly frosted MacIntosh apples, and little hard acorns falling. We are in the midst of cool crisp days, purple mists, and Nature recklessly tossing her whole palette of dazzling tones through fields and woodlands. — Jean Hersey

Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze. — Thomas Carlyle