Quotes

Ecology and Activism
In response to criticisms of Eco-Defense being a dangerous book. . . . . If you want to see a dangerous book take a look at one of the 50 year old plans for one of California's national forests. There are plans for terrorist activity laid out from the deliberate spraying of cancer and birth defect causing poisons to clear cutting that spells death for fisheries to annihilation of entire ecosystems.
Dave Foreman

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell -
Edward Abbey Ecological Interdependence:

Nature's processes have become a subset of human activity.
"Instead of a world where rain had an independent and mysterious existence, I was living in a world where rain was becoming a subset of human activity"
The End of Nature, Bill McKibben

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
Stanislaw Jerzy

From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch".
-Edgar Mitchell - former astronaut''I’m a short term pessimist and a long-term optimist. There are a few angry people like Earth First. But we need more angry people. I got angry in the 1920's. I've been angry every since.
Thomas Berry - Geologian

The task of humanity is to "reinvent the human at the species level, reflectively, within the community of life systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared dream experience. Thomas Berry - Geologian

I had come to believe that healthy natural ecosystems are the most important legacy we have from the past, above the ocean or below, and their protection is the single most important legacy we can bequeath to those who follow.
Author unknown

John Seed in Beyond Anthropocentrism argues that by identifying with the wilderness, one becomes the wilderness: "I am protecting the rain forest" develops to "I am part of the rain forest protecting myself. I am that part of the rain forest recently emerged into thinking."
When we fully identify with a wild place, then, monkeywrenching becomes self-defense, which is a fundamental right.

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.
Aldo Leopold

The planetary ecosystem is being nickel and dimed to death.
Drift nets are like strip mining the sea.
Sam Budde

It's as if we're playing planetary musical chairs and humans are sitting on almost all the remaining seats - Bill McKibben

Spirit

"Hope is a state of the mind, not of the world... Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed."
Vaclav Havel - former President of Czechslovakia

The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each others eyes for an instant?
Henry David Thoreau

The only real pain is the pain created by the expectation that life be other than it is"
15th Century Spanish Mystic

Bow to that which is so.
Jack Kornfield

I am, therefore you are. You are, therefore I am. We inter-are.
Thich Nhat Hanh: Being Peace, 1987

The present moment is a powerful Goddess - Goethe

"What we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do"
Stephen Covey

You and I, we think one thing, feel another, say a third, and do a fourth, so we need notes and files to keep track . . .What Gandhi thinks, what he feels, what he says, and what he does are all the same. He does not need notes.
Mahadev Desai

We live what we know. If we believe the universe and ourselves to be mechanical, we will live mechanically.
Marilyn Ferguson

How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose?
Alfie Kohn

Trying too well and trying to beat others are two different things. Excellence and victory are conceptually distinct . . .and are experienced differently. Alfie Kohn
There is no truth, only experience
Joeseph Campbell

Let's face it, passionate people are a pleasure to be around.
Sam Keen

Happiness is not having what you want but wanting what you have. One of the breathtaking paradox's is disengagement and engagement at the same time. Removed and involved at the same time. The great masters had this ability.
Jacob Needleman

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a Spirit is manifest in the Laws of the Universe . . ."
Einstein

Love is the shit that blooms and you never know when you're going to step in it .
Funk band

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
quoted in Mutant Message Down Under

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. Andre Gide

When we are not sure, we are alive.
Graham Greene

What we call evil is only a necessary moment in our endless development.
Franz Kafka

Simone Weil once said, I would like to achieve the kind of radiance that can bring about nonviolently what other people might have to do violently. And, of course, we see teachers like that. We see parents like that, who have a kind of radiance so that they do not have to raise their voice; they do not have to beat their children . . . They simply make a different atmosphere.
Sissela Bok

There was no distinction between eye and ear, ear and nose, nose and mouth: all were the same. My mind was frozen, my body in dissolution, my flesh and bones all melted together. I was wholly unconscious of what my body was resting on, or what was under my feet. I was borne this way and that on the wind, like dry chaff or leaves falling from a tree. In fact I knew not whether the wind was riding on me or I on the wind.
Lao-Tzu

All religions are the same, especially Buddhism.
Chesterson

The work we do on ourselves, whether it's psychological, or spiritual, is not meant to get rid of the waves in the ocean of life, but for us to learn how to surf.
Ken Wilber

Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.
Natalie Goldberg

Goethe believed that his passions, his changes of identity, and the ways that his emotions found form in poems obeyed exactly the same laws that make flowers bloom and wind erode mountains.
Reed

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
Henry David Thoreau

One thing we know is that each of us is the "Picasso" of something. When we embrace that specific something, our lives are transformed, as if by magic -
author unknown

It is easy to fly into a passion, anybody can do that. But to be angry with the right person and to the right extent and at the right time and with the right object and in the right way that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it.
Aristotle

Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.
C.S. Lewis

How could I have expected that after a long life I would understand no more than to wake up at night and to repeat: Strange, strange, strange. O how strange, how strange, O how funny and strange.
Czeslaw Miloz

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
Anne Frank

It's a function of human consciousness, of human strength to transform pain into wisdom.
Rachel Naomi Remen

That the self advances to confirm the myriad of things is delusion. That the myriad of things advance to confirm themselves is enlightenment.
Dogen

Learning consists of adding to ones knowledge day by day; the way of the Tao consists of subtracting day by day until one experiences reality as it is, not as it is named.
Lao-Tzu

It's rather embarrassing to have spent one's entire lifetime pondering the human condition and to come towards its close and find that I really don't have anything more profound to pass on by way of advice than, "Try to be a little bit kinder".
Aldous Huxley

From the only memorable commencement address I ever heard.
In it the speaker proposed that we do away with them and replace them with a movement from a great symphony, after which we would say, simply, to those who were graduating: "This is what life is like. Beauty mingled with sadness. It's sadness you cannot escape. Try no to miss its beauty either. God bless you all!"
Huston Smith

As long as the earth can create spring, I can create spring.
As long as the earth won't give up, I won't give up. I'm confident that you are not going to give up either. And I'm confident that because you won't give up, you won't miss life's beauty.
Alice Walker

Compassion is the radicalism of our time.
Dali Lama

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distances between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky"
Rainer Marie Rilke

We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.
Thich Nhat Hanh

The strangest and most wonderful constructions in the whole animal world are the amazing, intricate constructions made by the primate Homo Sapiens. Each normal individual of this species makes a self. Out of its brain it spins a web of words and deeds, and, like the other creatures, it doesn't have to know what it's doing, it just does it. This web protects it, just like the snail's shell, and provides it a livelihood, just like the spider's web, and advances its prospects for sex, just like the bowerbird's bower.
Daniel C. Dennett

In the dark times
Will there be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
About the dark times
Bertold Breht

If I have learned anything in my life, it is that bitterness consumes the vessel that contains it.
Rubin Hurricaneî Carter

Nature is like a radio band with infinite stations. The reality you are now experiencing is only one station on the band, completely convincing as long as you stay tuned to it, but quite different from the choices that lie on either side.
Deepak Chopra

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record- while, on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks.
Will Durant

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein

I was raised in a church with all the guilt and none of the ritual, and now I go to a church that has all the ritual and none of the guilt.
Paul Schrader

One of the worst blocks to creativity is addiction to logic. Another is the obsession to be right. And let us not forget our true origins: The individual self is pulled away from the universal Self by the identification with limited objects and transient states.
Author unknown

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why we call it, The Present.
Babatunde Olantunji

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by
small children and large nations.
David Friedman

There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Albert Einstein

He not busy being born is busy dying.
Bob Dylan

We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.
Anais In

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.
Lyall Watson

To love what you do and feel that it matters--how could anything be more fun?"
Katherine Graham

The most spiritual human beings, if we assume that they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but just for that reason they honor life because it pits its greatest opposition against them.
Nietzsche

We shall not cease from our exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot

Here we were snuggling over the paper pretending that the world was a known quantity, a land we’d gotten the lay of, that furthermore we were known to each other, as lovers and/or pals, when in fact we were missing each other, mostly. Mostly mysteries. Not that we were doing pretty well, for people who had only just met. But any miscommunication, like the one we'd just had, could pull away the trampoline, topple the whole illusion of buoyant ease. Comfort and danger: so hard to get the balances right. Because it is not as if I knew my husband. Rather I knew him so well I couldn't see him anymore. I knew him the way I know myself. All of our years together- they weren't money in the bank. They were cash in a mattress that could burn. Our years together were age, age itself: an indignation.
Lisa Zeidner from Layover

Forgive me my nonsense as I forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.
Jusse Nayeli - south african didjeridu maker

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell

No man consciously chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes if for the happiness that he seeks.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Science

The real puzzle of thermodynamics is not why entropy always increases with time, but why it was ever so low in the first place.
H. Price

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a Spirit is manifest in the Laws of the Universe . . ." EinsteinThe effort to understand the universe is one of the ver few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
Steven Weinberg

Sustainability is not just about wise use of resources; it is about the
cultural, political, and spiritual footprint we leave on the planet.
David Bolling publisher, Whole Earth