These acorn quotes will inspire you. The acorn, or oaknut, is the nut of the oaks and their close relatives (genera Quercus and Lithocarpus, in the family Fagaceae).
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging acorn quotes, acorn sayings, and acorn proverbs.
Famous Acorn Quotes
- “Each human being is bred with a unique set of potentials that yearn to be fulfilled as surely as the acorn yearns to become the oak within it.” ~ Aristotle
- “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn, the bird waits in the egg, and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.” ~ James Allen
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“Every noble achievement is a dream before it is a reality just as the oak is an acorn before it is a tree.” ~ Patience Strong
- “You cannot plant an acorn in the morning, and expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of an oak.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- “Just as the acorn contains the mighty oak tree, the Self has everything it needs to fulfill its destiny. When the inner conditions are right, it naturally emerges.” ~ Derek Rydall
- “An infinity of forest lies dormant within the dreams on one acorn.” ~ Wayne Dyer
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“An optimist is a man who plants two acorns and buys a hammock.” ~ Jean de Lattre de Tassigny
- “Before the acorn can bring forth the oak, it must become itself a wreck. No plant ever came from any but a wrecked seed.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “The boughs of the oak are roaring inside the acorn.” ~ Charles Tomlinson
- “It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.” ~ Alan Watts
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“Sometimes big trees grow out of acorns – I think I heard that from a squirrel.” ~ Jerry Coleman
- “I can see in the acorn the oak tree. I see the growth, the rebuilding, the restoring. I see that is the American psyche. There is so much we can draw understanding from. One of the lessons is the development of courage. Because without courage, you can’t practice any of the other virtues consistently.” ~ Maya Angelou , Acorn quotes oak trees
- “Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.” ~ E. F. Schumacher
- “There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years, from the small acorn of passion, into a great rooted tree” ~ Vita Sackville-West
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“The tallest oak tree once was an acorn that any pig could have swallowed.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
- “Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, water lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of education.” ~ Luther Burbank
- “Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “I trust and believe that this College, this seed that we have sown, will grow to shelter and nurture generations who may add most notably to the strength and happiness of our people, and to the knowledge and peaceful progress of the world. ‘The mighty oak from an acorn towers; A tiny seed can fill a field with flowers.'” ~ Winston Churchill
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“Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.” ~ Thomas Carlyle
- “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.” ~ Rollo May
- “Without courage you cannot practice any of the other virtues.” ~ Maya Angelou
- “You know, when you get your first asparagus, or your first acorn squash, or your first really good tomato of the season, those are the moments that define the cook’s year. I get more excited by that than anything else.” ~ Mario Batali
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“Acorns were good until bread was found.” ~ Francis Bacon
- “The mind has grown to its present state of consciousness as an acorn grows into an oak, or as saurians developed into mammals.” ~ Carl Jung
- “When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.” ~ Thomas Carlyle
- “Never lose a chance of saying a kind word. As Collingwood never saw a vacant place in his estate but he took an acorn out of his pocket and planted it, so deal with your compliments through life. An acorn costs nothing, but it may spread into a prodigious timber.” ~ William Makepeace Thackeray
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“Genius unexerted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher
- “The real truth is that the Obama administration is professional at bullying, as we have witnessed with ACORN at work during the presidential campaign. It seems to me they are sending down their bullies to create fist fights among average American citizens who don’t want a government-run health care plan forced upon them.” ~ Jon Voight
- “Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and again.” ~ Will Smith
- “We are, in a certain way, defined as much by our potential as by its expression. There is a great difference between an acorn and a little bit of wood carved into an acorn shape, a difference not always readily apparent to the naked eye. The difference is there even if the acorn never has the opportunity to plant itself and become an oak. Remembering its potential changes the way in which we think of the acorn and react to it. How we value it. If an acorn were conscious, knowing its potential would change the way that it might think and feel about itself.” ~ Rachel Naomi Remen
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“Our faith gives us knowledge of something better.” ~ E. F. Schumacher
- “”What is a human being, then?” “A seed.” “A… seed?” “An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree.”” ~ David Zindell
- “Only something as insane as human beings would ever asked themselves if ‘I’m good.’ You don’t find oak trees having existential crisis. ‘I feel so rotten about myself. I don’t produce as much acorns as the one next to me.'” ~ Adyashanti
- “Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
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“Oak trees come out of acorns, no matter how unlikely that seems. An acorn is just a tree’s way back into the ground. For another try. Another trip through. One life for another.” ~ Shirley Ann Grau
- “ACORN, you may recall, is the left-wing activist group with longtime ties to community organizer-turned-President Barack Obama. The nonprofit, which now takes in 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers after four decades on the public teat, has a history of engaging in voter fraud, corporate shakedowns, partisan bullying and pro-illegal immigration lobbying. The Democrats’ stimulus proposals could make the group – and its lesser known but even more radical ideological allies – eligible for upward of $5 billion in new public cash.” ~ Michelle Malkin
- “Schoolchildren and older people like the idea of planting trees. For children, it’s interesting that an acorn will grow into an oak, and for older people it’s a legacy. And the act of planting a tree is not that difficult.” ~ Clive Anderson
- “The acorn of honest inquiry has often sprouted and matured into a great oak of understanding.” ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf
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“For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree.” ~ Anthony Marra
- “I get hoes like acorns falling out of trees.” ~ Master P
- “Embryos turn into babies; buds turn into blossoms; acorns turn into oak trees. The same programming that exists in them exists in each of us – to manifest our highest potential. What is the difference between those things and us? That we can say no…So today, say yes.” ~ Marianne Williamson”What is the cause, though, of the growth of an acorn? The oak that is to come! What is to happen in the future is then the cause of what is occurring now; and, at the same time, what occurred in the past is also the cause of what is happening now. In addition, a great number of things round about, on every side, are causing what is happening now. Everything, all the time, is causing everything else” ~ Joseph Campbell
- “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.” ~ Walter de La Mare
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“An acorn would never brag about giving shade.” ~ Tim Cook
- “Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that.” ~ Graham Nelson
- “October arrives in a swirl of fragrant blue leaf smoke, the sweetness of slightly frosted MacIntosh apples, and little hard acorns falling. We are in the midst of cool crisp days, purple mists, and Nature recklessly tossing her whole palette of dazzling tones through fields and woodlands.” ~ Jean Hersey
- “I think character never changes; the Acorn becomes an Oak, which is very little like an Acorn to be sure, but it never becomes an Ash.” ~ Hester Lynch Piozzi
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“Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn sometimes.” ~ Susan Mallery
- “If you allow spirit to have dominion in your heart you will have dominion in your life. That changes thinking. That IS the miracle. That I’m not just a child of the body, I’m a child of the universe and in the universe I am programmed for greatness, and the fact that I don’t have money in my bank account now doesn’t mean I’m any less programmed for greatness. I was programmed for greatness just like the acorn is programmed to be an oak tree.” ~ Marianne Williamson
- “As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
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“Without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” ~ Maya Angelou
- “The greatest achievement was, at first, and for a time, but a dream.” ~ Napoleon Hill
- “I’ve been fighting with Acorn, alongside Acorn, on issues you care about, my entire career.” ~ Barack Obama
- “Organic growth is a cyclical process; it is just as true to say that the oak is a potential acorn as it is to say the acorn is a potential oak. But the process of writing a poem, of making any art object, is not cyclical but a motion in one direction toward a definite end.” ~ W. H. Auden
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“I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.” ~ Shirley Jackson
- “Tall oaks grow from little acorns.Testing. This is the text of an item. Testing. Origin. Testing. Quoted. Testing. Source. The diligent farmer plants trees, of which he himself will never see the fruit.” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero”The squirrel has not yet found the acorn that will grow to the oak that will be cut to form the cradle of the babe that will grow to slay me.” ~ Neil Gaiman
- “The Law of Divine Compensation posits that this is a self-organizing and self-correcting universe: the embryo becomes a baby, the bud becomes a blossom, the acorn becomes an oak tree. Clearly, there is some invisible force that is moving every aspect of reality to its next best expression.” ~ Marianne Williamson
- “Great oaks grow from little acorns. He has a green thumb. He has green fingers. He’s sowing his wild oats. Here Ceres’ gifts in waving prospect stand, And nodding tempt the joyful reaper’s hand.” ~ Alexander Pope
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“Nothing can match the treasure of common memories.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- “Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak.” ~ George R. R. Martin
- “A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Men educate each other in reason by contact or collision, and keep each other sane by the very conflict of their separate hobbies. Society as a whole is the deadly enemy of the particular crotchet of each, and solitude is almost the only condition in which the acorn of conceit can grow to the oak of perfect self-delusion.” ~ Edwin Percy Whipple
Acorn usually contains one seed (occasionally two seeds), enclosed in a tough, leathery shell, and borne in a cup-shaped cupule.
