Germ Quotes & Sayings

In the week before a race, I try to stay away from germ areas. I keep disinfectant wipes in my bag for when I have to use a supermarket trolley or something like that. — Paula Radcliffe

Everything that lives, it seems, must play host to the germ of its own dissolution. — Michael Pollan

He read the veinings of a leaf, the pattern on a mushroom cap, and divined mysteries, relations, futures, possibilities: the magic of symbols, the foreshadowing of numbers and writing, the reduction of infinitudes and multiplicities to simplicity, to system, to concept. For all these ways of comprehending the world through the mind no doubt lay within him, nameless, unnamed, but not inconceivable, not beyond the bounds of presentiment, still in the germ, but essential to his nature, part of him, growing organically within him. And if we were to go still further back beyond this Rainmaker and his time which to us seems so early and primitive, if we were to go several thousand years further back into the past, wherever we found man we would still find - this is our firm belief - the mind of man, that mind which has no beginning and always has contained everything that it later produces. — Hermann Hesse

Along with the possibility of extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm-substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends. — Rachel Carson

The people are the ultimate guardians of their own liberties. In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy ... Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. — Thomas Jefferson

Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one thing to chase the nameless entity, but quite another to find it. Spells might be all right - but suppose they weren't? — H.P. Lovecraft

Always take yourself seriously ... it's not the same as being pompous, or overly self-assured, but it is important to understand that the small little ideas that creep up in your mind, often contain the germ of a much larger project. All great art wasn't born as great art. It first needed to be recognized by the artist him/herself. Through his or her belief in it, it became true. — Wolfgang Tillmans

There is a Restlessness springing from the consciousness of power not fully utilized, which must be present wherever there is unused power of whatever kind. This is the restlessness of the germ within the seed, struggling upward and downward towards its proper life.it is a striving full of pain, the cutting of tender flesh by the fetters of the captive as he struggles against their pitilessness. — Anna Brackett

The paradox is the seed of truth. This germ just needs a fertile ground to flourish and bear fruit. — Leo Errera

But he was an only child and an only son, and for a mother in such a position it is not always easy to accept that another woman will eventually enter her son's life and, if all goes according to plan - the plan being that of the other woman - take him away. This common conflict, so understandable and so poignant, is played out time and time again, and almost always with the same painful result: Mother loses. It is so, of course, if Mother is overt in her attempt to put off the almost inevitable; if she is covert, then she stands a chance, admittedly a remote one, of introducing into her son's mind a germ of doubt that the woman he has chosen might not be the right one for him. That takes skill, and boundless patience, but it is a course fraught with dangers for the relationship between mother and future daughter-in-law, let alone for that between mother and son. — Alexander McCall Smith

We priests are sneered at and always shall be - the accusation is such an easy one - as deeply envious, hypocritical haters of virility. Yet whosoever has experienced sin must know that lust, with its parasitic growth, is for ever threatening to stifle virility as well as intelligence. Impotent to create, it can only contaminate in the germ the frail promise of humanity; it is probably at the very source, the primal cause of all human blemishes; and when amid the windings of this huge jungle whose paths are unknown, we encounter Lust, just as she is, as she emerged forth from the hands of the Master of Prodigies, the cry from our hearts is not only terror but imprecation: 'You, you alone have set death loose upon the world! — Georges Bernanos

The revolutions of thought which shape the basic outlook of an age are not disseminated through text-books- they spread like epidemics, through contamination by invisible agents and innocent germ carriers, by the most varied forms of contact, or simply by breathing the common air. — Arthur Koestler

If I do anything, I have to start over, but all I have is fragments of ideas. Just pieces. Like a germ of an idea for this, and a germ of an idea for that. Nothing whole or concrete" - Violet

" 'Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.' Pearl S. Buck. Maybe a germ is enough. Maybe it's all you need. We can start small. Open up a new document or pull out a black piece of paper. We'll make it our canvas. Remember what Michelangelo said about the sculpture being in the stone - it was there from the beginning, and his job was to bring it out. Your words are in there too" -Finch — Jennifer Niven

Seven Guidelines For a Healthy Diet
1. Substitute low-fat foods for high-fat foods
2. Cut down on meat-eat low on the food chain
3. Avoid salty and sugary foods
4. Cut down on sugar
5. Emphasize whole grains
6. Beware of alcohol
7. Emphasize the Healthy Five:
Raw unsalted nuts and sesame seeds
Sprouted seeds such as soybeans
Fresh raw wheat bran and wheat germ
Yogurt and kefir
Fresh fruits and vegetables — Jane Fonda

To write, I think one must sit in one place and be bored. Boredom is a very good state for writers to be. Things cook away in your head when you're bored, and suddenly one day, you have a book or a germ of a book. — Neel Mukherjee

Only here [in the Center] a new union can occur, as the Mysterious Pass is the ideal space and time to experience the interpenetrating fluctuations of Yin and Yang. The Mysterious Pass is therefore the primordial Chaos (hundun) containing the germ of life-the pre-cosmic sparkle of Original Yang and Original Yin-which is the prime mover and the materia prima of the alchemical work. — Monica Esposito

Silence.
What's this what's this oh my god can a men ever get lower can a man ever be less?
Weariness and gasping convulsive exhaustion. All life dead all life wasted and becoming nothing less than nothing only the germ of nothing. A kind of sickness that comes from shame. A weakness like dying weakness and faintness and a prayer. God give me rest take me away hide me let me die oh god how weary how much already dead how much gone and going oh god hide me and give me peace. — Dalton Trumbo

Man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. — Thomas Jefferson

A lot of ideas get re-used and made part of new songs if the first version didn't cut the mustard, and the stuff that gets left off usually contained the germ of something good but failed to reach a satisfactory state by the recording stage. — Bent Saether

The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. Slowly but surely it's robbed me of my mother, my wife, and everything that meant anything to me. It's like a germ planted in the skull that devours the brain, spreads to the trunk and the limbs, and destroys the entire body in time. No sooner am I out of bed in the morning than work clamps down on me and pins me to my desk before I've even had a breath of fresh air. It follows me to lunch and I find myself chewing over sentences as I'm chewing my food. It goes with me when I go out, eats out of my plate at dinner and shares my pillow in bed at night. It's so extremely merciless that once the process of creation is started, it's impossible for me to stop it, and it goes on growing and working even when I'm asleep. ... Outside that, nothing, nobody exists. — Emile Zola

An idea is like a cold germ: sooner or later someone always catches it. — Stephen King

If I blew my nose the Daily Express and the Daily Mail would say that I am trying to spread germ warfare. — Ken Livingstone

The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined. — George Saunders

the average American household is in more danger from chemical germ-killers than from germs. — Philip Yancey

The primitive history of the species is all the more fully retained in its germ-history in proportion as the series of embryonic forms traversed is longer; and it is more accurately retained the less the mode of life of the recent forms differs from that of the earlier, and the less the peculiarities of the several embryonic states must be regarded as transferred from a later to an earlier period of life, or as acquired independently. — Fritz Muller

It's obviously unfair to paint with a broad brush here, but the germ of an idea for a breakthrough in technology doesn't come out of a business school curriculum. It comes out of a laboratory or a math lecture or a physics tutorial. — Michael Moritz

Upon the union of the male germ cell with the female egg cell, a new cell is created which almost immediately splits into two parts. One of these grows rapidly, creating the human body of the individual with all its organs, and dies only with the individual. — Christian Lous Lange

To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be
over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future. — Bertrand Russell

To love! To surrender absolutely, to prostrate oneself before the divine image, to die a thousand imaginary deaths, to annihilate every trace of self, to find the whole universe embodied and enshrined in the living image of another! Adolescent, we say. Rot! This is the germ of the future life, the seed which we hide away, which we bury deep within us, which we smother and stifle and do our utmost to destroy as we advance from one experience to another and flutter and flounder and lose our way. — Henry Miller

If you believe that your nation is divinely ordained to rule Europe, and you must struggle to establish its supremacy, is that a religious doctrine or a nationalist one? In Germany especially, the whole super-nationalist ideology of the post-1871 empire is heavily imbued with religious teaching, chiefly Lutheran, and frankly viewing the new empire as the germ of the kingdom of God on Earth. — Philip Jenkins

Stand back far enough, and the absurdity of this enterprise makes you wonder about the sanity of our species. But consider: When millers mill wheat, they scrupulously sheer off the most nutritious parts of the seed - the coat of bran and the embryo, or germ, that it protects - and sell that off, retaining the least nourishing part to feed us. In effect, they're throwing away the best 25 percent of the seed: The vitamins and antioxidants, most of the minerals, and the healthy oils all go to factory farms to feed animals, or to the pharmaceutical industry, which recovers some of the vitamins from the germ and then sells them back to us - to help remedy nutritional deficiencies created at least in part by white flour. A terrific business model, perhaps, but terrible biology. Surely — Michael Pollan

Coca-Cola is just a concoction of chemicals; garlic wards off heart disease and cancer; an aspirin a day keeps the doctor away. None of these statements is true, but they contain a germ of truth. — John Emsley

But further, Hobbesian individualism required that traditional independent social authorities be eliminated or suppressed. Benjamin Constant, who was a keen observer of the French Revolution, explained why: "The interests and memories which spring from local customs contain a germ of resistance which is so distasteful to authority that it hastens to uproot it. Authority finds private individuals easier game: its enormous weight can flatten them out effortlessly as if they were so much sand. — Donald W. Livingston

Suffice to say that the TG2, Germ pre and EQ, and TG1 are there anytime I track drums, TG2 for guitars and the LTD-1 is there whenever I do vocals! — Billy Bush

Nietzsche was a Greek born two thousand years too late. His dreams were thoroughly Hellenic; his whole manner of thinking was Hellenic; his peculiar errors were Hellenic no less. But his Hellenism, I need not add, was anything but the pale neo-Platonism that has run like a thread through the thinking of the Western world since the days of the Christian Fathers. From Plato, to be sure, he got what all of us must get, but his real forefather was Heraclitus. It is in Heraclitus that one finds the germ of his primary view of the universe - a view, to wit, that sees it, not as moral phenomenon, but as mere aesthetic representation. The God that Nietzsche imagined, in the end, was not far from the God that such an artist as Joseph Conrad imagines - a supreme craftsman, ever experimenting, ever coming closer to an ideal balancing of lines and forces, — Friedrich Nietzsche

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it. — Graham Greene

Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases. — G. Stanley Hall

The little dissatisfaction which every artist feels at the completion of a work forms the germ of a new work. — Berthold Auerbach

It breeds in filth, feeds on filth in open closets, slop-barrels, on the streets and in back alleys and then comes into the house and wipes this germ-laden filth on our food or on the hands or even in the mouths of helpless babies. Who has not seen flies feeding on running sores on animals, or on "spit" on sidewalks? These — Leonard Haseman

Here I am thirty-four years old, and yet my life is almost wholly unexpanded. How much time is in the germ! There is such an interval between my ideal and the actual in many circumstances that I may say I am unborn. — Henry David Thoreau

Art has a double visage: it looks before and after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind; economizes the energy of genius. — George Edward Woodberry

If the germ plasm wants to swim in the ocean, it makes itself a fish; if the germ plasm wants to fly in the air, it makes itself a bird. If it wants to go to Harvard, it makes itself a man. The strangest thing of all is that the germ plasm that we carry around within us has done all those things. There was a time, hundreds of millions of years ago, when it was making fish. Then ... amphibia ... reptiles ... mammals, and now it's making men. — George Wald

For the same reason a disease cannot be cured by more of the germ that caused it, the inflation and debt accumulation of the Obama years will not inflate our way out of it. — Ron Paul

It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness! — Irvin D. Yalom

With beat of systole and of diastole One grand great life throbs through earth's giant heart, And mighty waves of single Being roll From nerveless germ to man, for we are part Of every rock and bird and beast and hill, One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill. From — Oscar Wilde

The private sector can go forward, if it must, with destruction of embryos for questionable and ethically challenged science. But spend the people's money on proven blood cord, bone marrow, germ cell, and adult cell research. — Roger Wicker

When you find a germ of truth, beware. Those germs can make you sick. — John R. Erickson

A bacteriologist is a man whose conversation always start with the germ of an idea. — Evan Esar

To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of the bodies in which they sit, we may expect to see adaptations that can be interpreted as for bodily survival. A large number of adaptations are of this type. To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of bodies other than those in which they sit, we may expect to see 'altruism', parental care, etc. To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of the group of individuals in which they sit, over and above the two effects just mentioned, we may expect to see adaptations for the preservation of the group. — Richard Dawkins

Man gains wider dominion by his intellect than by his right arm. The mustard-seed of thought is a pregnant treasury of vast results. Like the germ in the Egyptian tombs its vitality never perishes; and its fruit will spring up after it has been buried for long ages. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Perhaps a germ of love was springing in their hearts so pure that it might blossom in Paradise, since it could not be matured on earth; — Nathaniel Hawthorne

There's always a germ of truth in just about everything. — Jim Lehrer

Germ of endearment — E. Nesbit

Toddlers are germ-warfare machines in a cute package
- Debora Geary — Debora Geary

A germ of religious exaltation, no bigger than a mustard seed. — Yann Martel

True goodness is not without that germ of greatness that can bear with patience the mistakes of the ignorant. — Charles Caleb Colton

He rocked in the swells, floating like the first germ of life adrift on the earth's cooling seas, formless macule of plasm trapped in a vapor drop and all creation yet to come. — Cormac McCarthy

If only one country, for whatever reason, tolerates a Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ center for fresh sedition. If one little Jewish boy survives without any Jewish education, with no synagogue and no Hebrew school, it [Judaism] is in his soul. Even if there had never been a synagogue or a Jewish school or an Old Testament, the Jewish spirit would still exist and exert its influence. It has been there from the beginning and there is no Jew, not a single one, who does not personify it. — Adolf Hitler

The most celebrated germ expert in the world is almost certainly Dr. Charles P. Gerba of the University of Arizona, who is so devoted to the field that he gave one of his children the middle name Escherichia, after the bacterium Escherichia coli. — Bill Bryson

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

The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one. — Thomas Jefferson

A disease of the mind, [whose] germ is the idea that one may learn that which is valuable, or in any way acquire virtue, by the process of being shown things. — Kingsley Martin

Each of them, all unknowing, fairly gives its due to each chance of life, to each germ of death within itself. — Paul Valery

There is a germ of religion in human nature so strong that whenever an order of men can persuade the people by flattery or terror that they have salvation at their disposal, there can be no end to fraud, violence, or usurpation. — Christopher Hitchens

The
historical mission and the justification of capitalism are, in his eyes, to prepare the conditions for a
superior mode of production. This mode of production is not in itself revolutionary; it will only be the
consummation of the revolution. Only the fundamental principles of bourgeois production are
revolutionary. When Marx affirms that humanity only sets itself problems it can solve, he is
simultaneously demonstrating that the germ of the solution of the revolutionary problem is to be found in
the capitalist system itself. Therefore he recommends tolerating the bourgeois State, and even helping to
build it, rather than returning to a less industrialized form of production. The proletariat can and must
accept the bourgeois revolution as a condition of the working-class revolution. — Albert Camus

It must never be forgotten that nothing that is really great in this world has ever been achieved by coalitions, but that it has always been the success of a single victor. Coalition successes bear by the very nature of their origin the germ of future crumbling, in fact of the loss of what has already been achieved. Great, truly world-shaking revolutions of a spiritual nature are not even conceivable and realizable except as the titanic struggles of individual formations, never as enterprises of coalitions. — Adolf Hitler

Is there something I can do to kill the cancer germ? Can the rooms be fumigated ... ? Should I give up my lease and move out? — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Jobs, who could identify with each of those sentiments, wrote some of the lines himself, including "They push the human race forward." By the time of the Boston Macworld in early August, they had produced a rough version. They agreed it was not ready, but Jobs used the concepts, and the "think different" phrase, in his keynote speech there. "There's a germ of a brilliant idea there," he said at the time. "Apple is about people who think outside the box, who want to use computers to help them change the world." They debated the grammatical issue: If "different" was supposed to modify the verb "think," it should be an adverb, as in "think differently." But Jobs insisted that he wanted "different" to be used as a noun, as in "think victory" or "think beauty." Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in "think big. — Walter Isaacson

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost. — Bharati Mukherjee

It is in vain to oppose constitutional barriers to the impulse of self-preservation. It is worse than in vain; because it plants in the Constitution itself necessary usurpations of power, every precedent of which is a germ of unnecessary and multiplied repetitions. — James Madison

In short, the right given to one man to inflict corporal punishment on another is one of the ulcers of society, one of the most powerful destructive agents of every germ and every budding attempt at civilization, the fundamental cause of its certain and irretrievable destruction. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There are words which are worth as much as the best actions, for they contain the germ of them all. — Sophie Swetchine

Healthy American boobies, that's what we're fighting for," he said. "That needs to be in the Constitution. Every man has a right to life, liberty, and germ-free titties. Learn the drill, girls. If we show up at your front door, be ready to do your patriotic duty and show us your freedom-loving, virus-free knockers." The — Joe Hill

Bomb-proof vault. Our diseases are our attachments, be they habits, ideologies, ideals, principles, possessions, phobias, gods, cults, religions, what you please. Good wages can be a disease just as much as bad wages. Leisure can be just as great a disease as work. Whatever we cling to, even if it be hope or faith, can be the disease which carries us off. Surrender is absolute: if you cling to even the tiniest crumb you nourish the germ which will devour you. — Henry Miller

The heart of compassion is the germ of benevolence; the heart of shame, of dutifulness; the heart of courtesy and modesty, of observance of the rites; the heart of right and wrong, of wisdom. Man has these four germs just as he has four limbs. For a man possessing these four germs to deny his own potentialities is for him to cripple himself. — Mencius

He Sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in the other. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature ... the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth wile. — Nathanael West

There may be no sign of it, no probability of it, no germ of it from which to start, but God is able to make it out of nothing by a word. He does so make it by the word which faith claims. He needs no protoplasm to build His magnificent edifices of worlds. "He spake, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast." Into the soul that has no basis or remnant of goodness, but is dead in trespasses and sins, He can speak life and holiness. — A.B. Simpson

The mighty steam-engine has its germ in the simple boiler in which the peasant prepares his food. The huge ship is but the expansion of the floating leaf freighted with its cargo of atmospheric dust; and the flying balloon is but the infant's soap-bubble lightly laden and overgrown. But the Telescope, even in its most elementary form, embodies a novel and gigantic idea, without an analogue in nature, and without a prototype in experience — John Timbs

...except at the time you hardly knew that it was bad because you only barely knew anything at all, but all the time there was something which was just possibly the germ of hope, the knowledge and belief that one day you might be more than you were now. — Terry Pratchett

A sickness known as hate; not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ - but a sickness nonetheless, highly contagious, deadly in its effects. Don't look for it in the Twilight Zone - look for it in a mirror. Look for it before the light goes out altogether. — Rod Serling

Humanity is a germ that thrives on the very edge of catastrophe. — Joe Hill

The best is when we all go at once, like an army of interrelated popcorn zombies who laugh the same laughs and gasp the same gasps and aren't so germ-phobic with each other that we won't share a ginormous Coke with one straw. Family is useful like that. — Rachel Cohn

The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let's call it a---a germ. And let's say conditions prove right for that germ to develop---to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy and malice and frustration... — Sarah Waters

Black people are inferior to Caucasians. Blacks constitute a totally distinct group; they overshadow the country with the germ ... of evil. — David Wilmot

There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of freedom! — Gaston Bachelard

Tartakower once wrote that after planting a Knight in the center you can go to sleep. This is not to be taken literally, of course, but it contains more than a germ of truth. — Samuel Reshevsky

Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house. — Gaston Bachelard

...the water was scarcely inviting; for, through fear lest the output of the source should not suffice, the Fathers of the Grotto only allowed the water of the baths to be changed twice a day. And nearly a hundred patients being dipped in the same water, it can be imagined what a terrible soup the latter at last became. All manner of things were found in it, so that it was like a frightful consomme of all ailments, a field of cultivation for every kind of poisonous germ, a quintessence of the most dreaded contagious diseases; the miraculous feature of it all being that men should emerge alive from their immersion in such filth. — Emile Zola

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem. — Gaston Bachelard

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ. — John Steinbeck

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I. — Thomas Hardy

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness. — Pearl S. Buck

In the germ, when the first trace of life begins to stir, music is the nurse of the soul; it murmurs in the ear, and the child sleeps; the tones are companions of his dreams- they are the world in which he lives — Bettina Skrzypczak

In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate and improve. — Thomas Jefferson

Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for the unknown God. Then if a bird sing among your branches, do not be too eager to tame it. If you are conscious of something new - thought or feeling, wakening in the depths of your being - do not be in a hurry to let in light upon it, to look at it; let the springing germ have the protection of being forgotten, hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness. — Henri Frederic Amiel

Anyway, that was the germ of the idea and of course ... you know this was early days of sociology and whatever, especially on television. — Michael Apted

... the germ of the dilemma ... is trapped in the room with me, always has been, and always will be, and it is yet more foreign to me than those foreign hills outside. — James Baldwin

Sometimes I'll drive around for months despair, nothing, nothing, then suddenly I will see something that seizes me ... a shape, a combination of shapes, a play of light or shadows and I send up a prayer because I know I have the germ of a picture. — Jeffrey Smart

This surface good-nature which captivates a new acquaintance and is no bar to treachery, which knows no scruple and is never at fault for an excuse, which makes an outcry at the wound which it condones, is one of the most distinctive features of the journalist. This camaraderie (the word is a stroke of genius) corrodes the noblest minds; it eats into their pride like rust, kills the germ of great deeds, and lends a sanction to moral cowardice. — Honore De Balzac

I left him and took myself off, having become certain about a fact which was later on to cost me much peace of mind: that in one form or another I was in love with Hosna Bint Mahmoud, the widow of Mustafa Sa'eed, and that I - like him and Wad Rayyes and millions of others - was not immune from the germ of contagion that oozes from the body of the universe. — Tayeb Salih