“God bless all the precious little examples and all their cascading implications; without these gems, these tiny acorns bearing the blueprints of oak trees, essayists would be out of business.”

— Stephen Jay Gould, book Questioning the Millennium

Questioning the Millennium (second edition, Harmony, 1999), p. 42

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Stephen Jay Gould274

American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

David Zindell (1952) American writer

Source: War in Heaven (1998), p. 634

“An oak tree is an oak tree. That is all it has to do. If an oak tree is less than an oak tree, then we are all in trouble.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Being Peace

“One day, during one of their sessions, Gurdjieff tells Peters to look out the window and describe what he sees. 'An oak tree' the child answers. 'And what do you see on the oak tree?' 'Acorns' Peters replies. 'How many of these acorns do you suppose will become trees?' Fritz Peters is stumped, [-] 'Maybe five or six?'
'No' retorts Gurdjieff. 'Only one will become a tree, perhaps, none! Nature is always very giving, but it only gives possibility. It takes hard work and great effort to become a tree or a genuine man.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Reflections (1981)

“In 1919 I was the sole person who saw war in the form it would be; yet saw it only as an acorn and not as an oak.”

J. F. C. Fuller (1878–1966) British Army general

Quoted in Men Against Fire. S.L.A. Marshall (1947), p. 27.

“I tell brides and grooms to have many children. To bear many children and raise them is God's blessing. It is unthinkable the human beings apply their own standard of judgement and arbitrarily abort precious lives given to them by God. All life born into this world embodies God's will. All life is noble and precious, so it must be cared for and protected.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

2009, As a Peace Loving Global Citizen http://www.euro-tongil.org/TFbiography.pdf

“The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 1 : The Courage to Create, p. 21
Context: The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.

“After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until…”

Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) English poet and fiction writer

Source: The Return

“"Fare well!"
"A whole world of pain is contained in these words." How can it be contained in them? — It is bound up in them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 52e

“You will say, 'How can chance assemble in one place all the things necessary to produce an oak tree?' My answer is that it would be no miracle if the matter thus arranged had not formed an oak. But it would have been a very great miracle if, once the matter was thus arranged, an oak had not been formed.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)
Context: You will say, 'How can chance assemble in one place all the things necessary to produce an oak tree?' My answer is that it would be no miracle if the matter thus arranged had not formed an oak. But it would have been a very great miracle if, once the matter was thus arranged, an oak had not been formed. A few less of some shapes, and it would have been an elm, a poplar, a willow, an elder, heather or moss. A little more of some other shapes and it might have been a sensitive plant, an oyster in its shell, a worm, a fly, a frog, a sparrow, an ape or a man.

“The Machine Age’s commitment to cause and effect was the source of many dilemmas, including the one involving free will. At the turn of the century the American philosopher E. A. Singer, Jr., showed that science had, in effect, been cheating. It was using two different relationships but calling both cause and effect. He pointed out, for example, that acorns do not cause oaks because they are not sufficient, even though they are necessary, for oaks. An acorn thrown into the ocean, or planted in the desert or an Arctic ice cap does not yield an oak. To call the relationship between an acorn and an oak ‘probabilistic’ or ‘non deterministic causality,’ as many scientists did, was cheating because it is not possible to have a probability other than 1.0 associated with a cause; a cause completely determines its effect. Therefore, Singer chose to call this relationship ‘producer-product’ and to differentiate it from cause-effect.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1980s, Creating the Corporate Future, 1981, p. 224-225 as cited in: David Ing (2010) "The producer-product relation, and coproducers in systems theory". in the Coevolving blog, September 02, 2010.

“God bless all the precious little examples and all their cascading implications; without these gems, these tiny acorns bearing the blueprints of oak trees, essayists would be out of business.”

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