“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.”
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.
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Cyrano de Bergerac 57
French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist 1619–1655Related quotes
Quoted in Men Against Fire. S.L.A. Marshall (1947), p. 27.
<p>Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland.
Der Eichenbaum
Wuchs dort so hoch, die Veilchen nickten sanft.
Es war ein Traum.</p><p>Das küßte mich auf deutsch und sprach auf deutsch
(Man glaubt es kaum
Wie gut es klang) das Wort: "Ich liebe dich!"
Es war ein Traum.</p>
In Der Fremde (In a Foreign Land)
Joseph Beuys (1982), cited in: Claudia Mesch (2013) Art and Politics: A Small History of Art for Social Change Since 1945. p. 160
1980's
Human Destiny, 1947, p. 33
Commenting on Charles-Eugene Guye's calculation that the odds against the random formation of a particular protein molecule would be about 1 in 10 to the 243rd.
“You must remember that an oak tree is not a crime against the acorn.”
Source: War in Heaven (1998), p. 634
Source: The 48 Laws of Power
“You woke up on the wrong side of the oak tree, didn’t you? (Acheron)”
Source: Acheron