“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…”

Source: The Return

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Walter de la Mare33

English poet and fiction writer 1873–1956

David Zindell (1952) American writer

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

“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.

“There's real strangeness in this world of ours. Back in the machine times, there was so much noise front and back, so to speak, it kept us from knowing what lies behind the surface of things.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 55, p. 262

“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

“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.

“Heart of oak are our ships,
Heart of oak are our men;
We always are ready.”

David Garrick (1717–1779) English actor, playwright, theatre manager and producer

Hearts of Oak. Compare: "Our ships were British oak, And hearts of oak our men", S. J. Arnold, Death of Nelson.

“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

“"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

“Like hearts of oak.”

Francois Rabelais book Gargantua and Pantagruel

Author's prologue.
Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Fifth Book (1564)

“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.

“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…”

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Walter de la Mare33

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