„Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.“

— Martin Luther

Earliest record is in a circular letter from Hessian Church minister Karl Lotz on 5 October 1944 and modified from a quote by Johanan ben Zakai according to [Landes, Richard Allen, Heaven on Earth: The varieties of the millennial experience, USA, Oxford University Press, 2011, 978-0-19-975359-8, https://books.google.com/books?id=seS-0JTykgoC&pg=PA48, 48]

Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Martin Luther / Disputed
Misattributed

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Nov. 2, 2021.

Martin Luther214

seminal figure in Protestant Reformation 1483 - 1546

Related quotes

„Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.“

— Martin Luther King, Jr. American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement 1929 - 1968

Martin Luther
Misattributed

World, Tree, Deep, Inspirational

„The Author to the Reader
I’ve read that Luther said (it’s come to me
So often that I’ve made it into meter):
And even if the world should end tomorrow
I still would plant my little apple-tree.
Here, reader, is my little apple-tree.“

— Randall Jarrell poet, critic, novelist, essayist 1914 - 1965

epigraph, p. vi
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

World, Tree, Reading

„On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree“

— W.S. Merwin American poet 1927 - 2019

World, Tree

„If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, Their Oil would become Tears.“

— Mahmoud Darwich Palestinian writer 1941 - 2008

Tear, Tree

„If everyone knew exactly what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there?“

— Douglas Adams, book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Source: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

„Every tree and plant in the meadow seemed to be dancing, those which average eyes would see as fixed and still.“

— Rumi Iranian poet 1207 - 1273

Disputed, The Essential Rumi (1995)

Tree, Dance

„I would take to be quite a fool any man who would make a book full of laws and statutes for an apple tree telling it how to bear apples and not thorns, when the tree is able by its own nature to do this better than the man with all his books can describe and demand.“

— Martin Luther seminal figure in Protestant Reformation 1483 - 1546

Source: Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (1523), p. 89

Books, Law, Fools, Nature

„I still have no desire to own [an Apple Watch], or even any desire to go to the Apple store and look at one or hold one in my hand. … The only question, it seems to me, is this: At what point can Apple Watch be declared a swing and a miss?“

— Daniel Lyons American writer 1960

I can’t get excited about the Apple Watch http://goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/8481697-i-can-t-get-excited-about-the-apple-watch in Goodreads (3 June 2015)

Question

„I had to go to the store, I had decided, to bring back some apples — and I went past the store that sold apples and I kept driving, and driving. I was going south, and west, because if I went north or east I would run out of world too soon.“

— Neil Gaiman, book Fragile Things

From Bitter Grounds
Fragile Things (2006)

World, Past

„My troubles are all over, and I am at home; and often before I am quite awake, I fancy I am still in the orchard at Birtwick, standing with my friends under the apple trees.“

— Anna Sewell, book Black Beauty

Source: Black Beauty

Home, Tree

„I guess I always felt even if the world came to an end, McDonald's would still be open.“

— Susan Beth Pfeffer, book Life As We Knew It

Source: Life As We Knew It

World

„My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still.
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.“

— Robert Frost American poet 1874 - 1963

" After Apple Picking http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/after-apple-picking-3/"
1910s

Tree

„I had felt with the might of my fast circulating blood that my death would not rob this tree of its irradiant beauty, it would only rob the world of my gaze.“

— Jorge Semprún Spanish writer 1923 - 2011

Death, World, Beauty, Tree

„The angel had told me in my dream that if I wanted to acquire the perfect knowledge I desired, I would have to go to the Moon. There I would find Adam's paradise and the Tree of Knowledge.“

— Cyrano de Bergerac French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist 1619 - 1655

Elijah to Cyrano
The Other World (1657)
Context: The angel had told me in my dream that if I wanted to acquire the perfect knowledge I desired, I would have to go to the Moon. There I would find Adam's paradise and the Tree of Knowledge. As soon as I had tasted its fruit, my mind would be enlightened with all the truths a person could know. That is the voyage for which I built my chariot.
Finally, I climbed aboard and, when I was securely settled on the seat, I tossed the magnetic ball high into the air. The chariot I had built was more massive in the middle than at the ends; it was perfectly balanced because the middle rose faster than the extremities. When I had risen to the point that the magnet was drawing me to, I seized the magnetic ball and tossed it into the air again.

Dreams, Angels, Knowledge, Tree

„What if we knew what tomorrow would bring? Would we fix it? Could we?“

— Cecelia Ahern Irish novelist 1981

Source: The Book of Tomorrow

„I knew it. I knew this would happen to me… They were never going to let me be president.“

— Hillary Clinton American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady 1947

On election night, as reported in Amy Chozick's book Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling (2018) and quoted in "Hillary Clinton On Election Night: ‘They Were Never Going to Let Me Be President’" https://www.thedailybeast.com/hillary-clinton-they-were-never-going-to-let-me-be-president by Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast (20 April 2018)
Attributed