“But the fruit that can fall without shaking
Indeed is too mellow for me.”
The Answer.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
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Mary Wortley Montagu 8
writer and poet from England 1689–1762Related quotes
"To Autumn", st. 1
Poems (1820)
Context: Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the ground, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
“Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.”
C 26
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook C (1772-1773)
“A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation.”
A: Quod est enim maius argumentum nihil eam prodesse quam quosdam perfectos philosophos turpiter vivere?
M: Nullum vero id quidem argumentum est. Nam ut agri non omnes frugiferi sunt qui coluntur [...] sic animi non omnes culti fructum ferunt. Atque, ut in eodem simili verser, ut ager quamvis fertilis sine cultura fructuosus esse non potest, sic sine doctrina animus; ita est utraque res sine altera debilis. Cultura autem animi philosophia est; haec extrahit vitia radicitus et praeparat animos ad satus accipiendos eaque mandat eis et, ut ita dicam, serit, quae adulta fructus uberrimos ferant.
Book II, Chapter V; translation by Andrew P. Peabody
Tusculanae Disputationes – Tusculan Disputations (45 BC)
Context: A: For what stronger proof can there be of its [philosophy's] uselessness than that some accomplished philosophers lead disgraceful lives?
M: It is no proof at all; for as all cultivated fields are not harvest-yielding [... ] so all cultivated minds do not bear fruit. To continue the figure – as a field, though fertile, cannot yield a harvest without cultivation, no more can the mind without learning; thus each is feeble without the other. But philosophy is the cultivation of the soul. It draws out vices by the root, prepares the mind to receive seed, and commits to it, and, so to speak, sows in it what, when grown, may bear the most abundant fruit.
“When a big tree falls, the earth shakes.”
Rajiv Gandhi, commenting on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots following the murder of Indira Gandhi, quoted in Hindustan Times
Quote
Source: 1984 anti-Sikh riots 'wrong', says Rahul Gandhi, Hindustan Times, 18 November 2008, 5 May 2012, yes, https://web.archive.org/web/20131012025532/http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/India/India/Article1-352523.aspx, 12 October 2013 http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/India/India/Article1-352523.aspx,
“Science is not inevitable; this question is very fruitful indeed.”
In personal correspondence, quoted in Elisabeth Nemeth's chapter "Logical Empiricism and the History and Sociology of Science" in the Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism (2007) edited by Alan W. Richardson and Thomas Uebel.
"This Cruel Age has deflected me..." (1944)
Context: This cruel age has deflected me,
like a river from this course.
Strayed from its familiar shores,
my changeling life has flowed
into a sister channel.
How many spectacles I've missed:
the curtain rising without me,
and falling too. How many friends
I never had the chance to meet.
“And from the magic tree of life the fruit falls everywhere.”
The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)
Context: For sure the enchanted waters pour through every wind that blows.
I think when night towers up aloft and shakes the trembling dew
How every high and lonely thought that thrills my being through
Is but a ruddy berry dropped down through the purple air,
And from the magic tree of life the fruit falls everywhere.