Quotes about fruit
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Jodi Picoult photo
Samuel Butler photo
Alexander Pope photo
James Joyce photo

“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”

683
Source: Ulysses (1922)

T.S. Eliot photo
Dave Barry photo
Cinda Williams Chima photo
José Ortega Y Gasset photo

“The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities.”

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

"Taboo and Metaphor"
The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)
Context: The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. A strange thing, indeed, the existence in man of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another — from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second.

Joyce Meyer photo

“Where there is a rotten root, there will always be rotten fruit.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

Variant: Where there is a rotten root, there will always be rotten fruit. We must be rooted in Jesus Christ.

Helen Hunt Jackson photo
John Milton photo
Clive Barker photo
Henry David Thoreau photo
Joyce Meyer photo
Rick Riordan photo
John Bunyan photo

“Letting ourselves be forgiven is one of the most difficult healings we will undertake. And one of the most fruitful. (79)”

Stephen Levine (1937–2016) American poet and author

Source: A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last

Anna Quindlen photo
George Santayana photo
Henry David Thoreau photo
Zeena Schreck photo
Albert Einstein photo
Sigmund Freud photo
Woody Allen photo

“Some guy hit my car fender the other day, and I said unto him, "Be fruitful and multiply."”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

But not in those words.
The Woody Allen Companion (1993) edited by StephenJ. Spignesi, Ch. 7.

“A fruit salad is delicious precisely because each fruit maintains its own flavor.”

Sean Covey (1964) author; business executive

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens: The Ultimate Teenage Success Guide

Groucho Marx photo

“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

No known citation to Marx. First appears unattributed in mid-1960s logic/computing texts as an example of the difficulty of machine parsing of ambiguous statements. Google Books http://books.google.co.uk/books?client=firefox-a&lr=&as_brr=0&q=%22fruit-flies%22+%22time+flies%22+banana&btnG=Search+Books&as_drrb_is=b&as_minm_is=0&as_miny_is=1900&as_maxm_is=0&as_maxy_is=1970. The Yale Book of Quotations dates the attribution to Marx to a 9 July 1982 net.jokes post on Usenet.
Misattributed

Christina Rossetti photo
Walt Whitman photo

“Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard."

[]”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Source: The Complete Poems

Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni photo

“She who sows vengeance must reap its bloody fruit.”

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1956) novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist

Source: The Palace of Illusions

Jeanette Winterson photo
Susan Sontag photo

“One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Source: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

Charles Baudelaire photo
Erich Fromm photo

“Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with - the love of life”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Source: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

Marcus Tullius Cicero photo

“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.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

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.

John Bevere photo
Evelyn Waugh photo

“If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper…”

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) British writer

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Alexandre Dumas photo
Pablo Neruda photo
Jean Vanier photo
Henry David Thoreau photo
Brian Jacques photo
Henri Bergson photo
Jim Davis photo

“Don't eat fruits or nuts. You are what you eat.”

Jim Davis (1945) American cartoonist and creator of Garfield
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Source: 1960s, Strength to Love (1963), Ch. 1 : A tough mind and a tender heart
Context: The strong man holds in a living blend strongly marked opposites. The idealists are usually not realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self-assertive humble. But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony. The philosopher Hegel said that truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in the emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.

Edmund Burke photo

“Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure — but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and the invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place. This law is not subject to the will of those, who by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law. The municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty at their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement, wholly to separate and tear asunder the bands of their subordinate community, and to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles. It is the first and supreme necessity only, a necessity that is not chosen, but chooses, a necessity paramount to deliberation, that admits no discussion, and demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort to anarchy. This necessity is no exception to the rule; because this necessity itself is a part too of that moral and physical disposition of things, to which man must be obedient by consent or force: but if that which is only submission to necessity should be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled, from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow.”

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Anthony Bourdain photo
Arthur Cecil Pigou photo

“While we keep aloof in general statements, there is little fruit to be expected; it is the hand-fight that does execution.”

Joseph Alleine (1634–1668) Pastor, author

Source: An Alarm to the Unconverted aka A Sure Guide to Heaven (first published 1671), P. 68.

William Morris photo
William James photo

“No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means
1900s, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)

Camille Paglia photo
John Tyndall photo

“[K]nowledge and progress are the fruits of action.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

p, 125
New Fragments (1892)

James Russell Lowell photo
Henryk Sienkiewicz photo
Wallace Stevens photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
William Ellery Channing photo

“We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit; but the same blunder is made by every person who is overeager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Philip Nicholas Shuttleworth (1782–1842) http://openlibrary.org/a/OL4475476A/Philip-Nicholas-Shuttleworth, bishop of Chichester, in an address "Christ's Yoke Easy and Burden Light", published in The Sunday Library; or, The Protestant's Manual for the Sabbath-day (1831) http://books.google.com/books?id=sd0EAAAAQAAJ by Thomas Frognall Dibdin; this seems to have become misattributed to Channing in A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908) by Tryon Edwards
Misattributed

Mahatma Gandhi photo
Hans Arp photo
Emil M. Cioran photo
Samuel Beckett photo
Max Scheler photo
Neil Peart photo
Edmund Waller photo

“There is a garden in her face
Where roses and white lilies blow;
A heavenly paradise is that place,
Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow:
There cherries grow which none may buy
Till 'Cherry-ripe' themselves do cry.”

Edmund Waller (1606–1687) English poet and politician

Cherry-Ripe http://www.bartleby.com/101/168.html.
Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham (1857)

Richard Cobden photo
Alphonse de Lamartine photo
Hugh Plat photo
Joseph Conrad photo

“In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom.”

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

The Arrow of Gold http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/argld10h.htm (1919), Author's note,

Jefferson Davis photo
Camille Paglia photo
David Horowitz photo
Báb photo

“The acts of Him Whom God shall make manifest are like unto the sun, while the works of men, provided they conform to the good-pleasure of God, resemble the stars or the moon… Thus, should the followers of the Bayán observe the precepts of Him Whom God shall make manifest at the time of His appearance, and regard themselves and their own works as stars exposed to the light of the sun, then they will have gathered the fruits of their existence; otherwise the title of ‘starship’ will not apply to them. Rather it will apply to such as truly believe in Him, to those who pale into insignificance in the day-time and gleam forth with light in the night season.
Such indeed is the fruit of this precept, should anyone observe it on the Day of Resurrection. This is the essence of all learning and of all righteous deeds, should anyone but attain unto it. Had the peoples of the world fixed their gaze upon this principle, no Exponent of divine Revelation would ever have, at the inception of any Dispensation, regarded them as things of naught. However, the fact is that during the night season everyone perceiveth the light which he himself, according to his own capacity, giveth out, oblivious that at the break of day this light shall fade away and be reduced to utter nothingness before the dazzling splendour of the sun.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

VIII, 1
The Persian Bayán

Thomas Hood photo
Arshile Gorky photo
Franz Marc photo

“I cannot get over the strange conflict between my estimation of their ideas [the artists of Italian Futurism ] most of which I find brilliant and fruitful, and my view of the [their] pictures [he saw on the Walden exhibition in Berlin, Spring 2012], which strike me as, without a doubt, utterly mediocre.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

In a letter to Wassily Kandinsky, 1912; as quoted in Movement, Manifesto, Melee: The Modernist Group, 1910-1914, Milton A. Cohen, Lexington Books, Sep 14, 2004, p. 309 (note 23)
[in a letter, several months later to August Macke Franz Marc writes about the Futurist paintings he saw in Munich: '[Their] effect is magnificent, far, far more impressive then in Cologne' (where Marc had helped Macke with hanging the Futurist exposition)].
1911 - 1914

Paul of Tarsus photo

“For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.”

Paul of Tarsus (5–67) Early Christian apostle and missionary

Hebrews 12:11, as quoted in www.ewtn.com http://www.ewtn.com/ewtn/bible/search_bible.asp#ixzz2z6uWPJG3
Epistle to the Hebrews

Freeman Dyson photo
Carrie Ann Inaba photo

“We saw that amazing documentary 'Forks Over Knives' and that cleared everything up for us. Every Sunday we're going to the farmers market now, getting our fresh fruits and veggies. It's just two weeks, but we feel much better. I love animals. I don't want to eat them.”

Carrie Ann Inaba (1968) American entertainer

After she and her fiancé, Jesse Sloan, became vegetarians, in "Carrie Ann Inaba goes vegetarian, George Takei shops for a hybrid", in MNN.com (16 November 2011) http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/carrie-ann-inaba-goes-vegetarian-george-takei-shops-for-a-hybrid

Syama Prasad Mookerjee photo
Stephen Colbert photo

“You said the war would pay for itself in fruit baskets. You said that our soldiers would march in the streets of Havana and people would shower them with bananas and cigars. That didn’t happen. Would you like to look into the camera and apologize to the American people?”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

One of his questions to President Theodore Roosevelt in his series <i>Better Know A President</i> on <i>The Colbert Report</i> http://www.nofactzone.net/?p=1788 (17 May 2006)

Kent Hovind photo
Bill Bryson photo
Francis Bacon photo
Richard Cobden photo
Dietrich Bonhoeffer photo
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo
John Ruysbroeck photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo

“But tell me, black and white, may they be used or not, are they forbidden fruit? You... think that when the shadows are dark, ay, black, that it is all wrong then, don't you? I don't think so... Rembrandt and Hals, didn't they use black? And Velasquez???”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Nuenen, The Netherlands, Autumn 1885; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 428) p. 31
1880s, 1885