“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.”
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Jorge Semprún 1
Spanish writer 1923–2011Related quotes
Recorded by Charles Larpenteur at Fort Union in 1867. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the Shield. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993. p. 73.
“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
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
“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
Martin Luther
Misattributed
Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 159
Context: It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.
The Other World (1657)
Source: The Seth Material (1970), p. 123
Context: Some people think that we are stuck in physical reality like flies in flypaper or victims in quicksand, so that each motion we make only worsens our predicament and hastens our extinction. Others see the universe as a sort of theater into which we are thrust at birth and from which we depart forever at death. In the backs of their minds people with either attitude will see a built-in threat in each new day; even joy will be suspect because it, too, must end in the body's eventual death. I used to feel this way. When I fell in love with Rob, my joy served to double the underlying sense of tragedy I felt, as if death mocked me all the more by making life twice as precious. I saw each day bringing me closer to a total extinction that I could hardly imagine, but which I resented with growing vehemence.