Our faith gives us knowledge of something better.
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.
Tall oaks branch charmed by the earnest stars Dream and so dream all night without a stir.
In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.
Without courage you cannot practice any of the other virtues.
Without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently.
Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping, For only the hand of God can contain your hearts.
If you don't have courage, you can't practice any of the other virtues.
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.
You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different.
Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts who stood their ground.
When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did [Claude Elwood] Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you.
Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree', or `that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.
So they all went away from the little log house. The shutters were over the windows, so the little house could not see them go. It stayed there inside the log fence, behind the two big oak trees that in the summertime had made green roofs for Mary and Laura to play under.
Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?
Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.
The hardest shot in golf is a mashie at 90 yards from the green, where the ball has to be played against an oak tree, bounces back into a sandtrap, hits a stone, bounces on the green and then rolls into the cup. That shot is so difficult I have made it only once.
School is a building that has four walls-with tomorrow inside. Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds. There are many ways of going forward, but there is only one way of standing still. A lot of us would like to move mountains, but few of us are willing to practice on small hills. Doing your best is more important than being the best. Giant oak trees started out as little nuts. The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.
The oak tree: not interested in cherry blossoms.
If a hundred-foot oak tree had the mind of a human, it would only grow to be ten feet tall!
or simply:
