"If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture--that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves." -Edward Abbey

"Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rd-world black, lesbian, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist." -Edward Abbey

"What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse." -Edward Abbey

"god is not
the voice in the whirlwind.

god is the whirlwind.

at the last
judgment we will all be trees."
-Margaret Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie

"The Great Spirit is in all things, he is in the air we breathe. The Great Spirit is our Father, but the Earth is our Mother. She nourishes us, that which we put into the ground she returns to us..." -Big Thunder (Bedagi), Wabanaki Algonquin

"It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds." -Black Elk

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."
-William Blake

"There is a responsibility in the taking of any life. To pull up a plant by the roots for no good reason is the same as wantonly killing an animal." -Tom Brown, Jr., Tom Brown's Field Guide to Wilderness Survival

"Part of our peacemaking was the realization that life is essentially no different in a man than it is in a paramecium, a fly, a salamander, or a deer. All share the same spark of life and spirit. All are part of the same superconsciousness, living in one place under the sun, connected by a frail umbilical cord to the nourishing Earth Mother. Everything moves within our movements, and we move within the movements of everything else. Understanding these things with our innermost beings, we also understood that to remove an animal from the flow of life, without respect and without utilizing everything, is a sacrilege." -Tom Brown, Jr., Tom Brown's Field Guide to Wilderness Survival

"And I don't mean heaven like Godlike
Cuz the animal I am knows very well
That Nature is our teacher and our mother
And God is just another story that we tell."
-Ani DiFranco, "Icarus"

"You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should." -Max Ehrmann

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves form this prison by wedening our circle of compassion to enhance all living creatures and the whole of nature." -Albert Einstein

"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty--it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man." -Albert Einstein

"I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals. Being at one with nature." -Mikhail Gorbachev

"For Native Americans, human existence was inseparable from the plants, animals, earth, and sky that comprised the great mystery of life. All entities, including humans, were part of an eternal cycle and thus possessed intimate kinship, one that fostered special obligations." -Bruce Hampton, The Great American Wolf

"Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books." -Carl Jung

"Even sticks and stones have a spiritual essence, a manifestation of the mysterious power that fills the Universe." -Lakota saying

"The Great Spirit is one, yet he is many. He is part of the sun and the sun is a part of him. He can be in a thunderbird or in an animal or plant." -Lame Deer

"I met a medicine man, one of my uncles. 'Tell me about the Great Spirit,' I asked him. 'He is not like a human being, like the white god. He is a power. That power could be in a cup of coffee. The Great Spirit is no old man with a beard.'" -Lame Deer

"Nothing is so small and unimportant but it has a spirit given to it by Wakan Tanka. Tunkan is what you might call a stone god, but he is also part of the Great Spirit. The gods are separate beings, but they are all united in Wakan Tanka. It is hard to understand -- something like the Holy Trinity. You can't explain it except by going back to the 'circles within circles' idea, the spirit splitting itself up into stones, trees, tiny insects even, making them all wakan by his ever-presence. And in turn all these myriad of things which make up the universe flowing back to their source, united in the one Grandfather Spirit." -Lame Deer

"Everything has its beginning in water." -Lame Deer

"Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it. Woniya wakan--the holy air--which renews all by its breath." -Lame Deer

"When we killed a buffalo, we knew what we were doing. We apologized to his spirit, tried to make him understand why we did it, honoring with a prayer the bones of those who gave their flesh to keep us alive, praying for their return, praying for the life of our brothers, the buffalo nation, as well as for our own people." -Lame Deer

"All of nature is in me, and a bit of myself is in all of nature." -Lame Deer

"Our beliefs are rooted deep in our earth, no matter what you have done to it and how much of it you have paved over. And if you leave all that concrete unwatched for a year or two, our plants, the native Indian plants, will pierce that concrete and push up through it." -Lame Deer

"We are stardust, we are golden
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden"
-Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock"

"From my rotting body,
flowers shall grow
and I am in them
and that is eternity."
-Edvard Munch

"The thoughts of the earth are my thoughts. The voice of the earth is my voice." -Navajo prayer

"Every track begins and ends in the hand of god, and every track is a lifetime long. Hunter and hunted are both standing in their tracks when they meet, and there are no tracks, however far-flung, that fall outside the hand of god. All paths lie together like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no grater or less than the bettle's or the mouse's. All are held together." -Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

"The deer aren't our prey or our possessions -- they're us. They're us at one point in the cycle of life and we're them at another point in the cycle. The deer are twice your parents, for your mother and father are deer, and the deer that gave you its life today was mother and father to you as well, since you wouldn't be here if it weren't for that deer." -Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

"The world is a sacred place and a sacred process...and we're part of it." -Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

"The world doesn't belong to us, we belong to it. Always have, always will. We belong to the world. We belong to the community of life on this planet--it doesn't belong to us. We got confused about that, now it's time to set the record straight." -Daniel Quinn, Providence

"Animism isn't a collection of practices and doctrines that are drawn upon for special occasions. It isn't an aspect of life that can be separated out and isolated from all others. Animists are not so much people with a religion as people with a fundamentally religious way of looking at things." -Daniel Quinn, Providence

"I am never disappointed with God (or as I prefer to say, the gods). This is because I never expect the gods to take my side against others. If I come down with the flu, I don't expect the gods to take my side against the virus that is pursuing its life in my body. If I travel to Africa, I don't expect the gods to strike dead a mosquito that is about to have lunch on my neck (and incidentally give me a case of malaria). If a wildcat attacks me in the hills of New Mexico, I don't expect the gods to help me kill it. If I'm swimming in the ocean, I don't expect the gods to chase away the sharks. I have no illusion that the gods favor me (or any other human) over viruses, sharks, wildcats, mosquitos, or any other life form. And if they don't favor me over a june bug or a mushroom, why would they favor me over another human being? If a friend of mine is killed in a random act of terrorist violence, I'm not going to blame the gods for this. To me, this would be nonsense. And I certainly don't expect the gods to suspend the laws of physics to protect me from landslides, lightning bolts, or burning buildings." -Daniel Quinn, Providence

"Animism is the only world religion that doesn't need to scurry to get aboard the environmentalist bandwagon. It was there long, long before the bandwagon started rolling among the Takers." -Daniel Quinn, Providence

"If tomorrow we were to wake up and learn that the night had brought forth a new, vital religion so universally acceptable to humanity that all religious disagreement had utterly vanished from the world, this would be accounted one of the greatest miracles in history and the very greatest miracle in the history of our spiritual development.
"Well, there once was such a religion on this planet. Everyone is more or less aware of this fact, but no one--no one at all--has ever suggested that this was miraculous or even remarkable. No one has ever suggested that this universal religion might have even the slightest claim to validity. Needless to say, this was not one of our religions. It was (and is) the religion of the Leavers, and for this reason it is judged not to count as a religion at all, is judged to be merely a prereligion, a crude evolutionary stage that people had to pass through in order to arrive at the enlightened and advanced religions that evoke such murderous fervor among the Takers." -Daniel Quinn, Providence

"Remember that your tracks are one strand of the web woven endlessly in the hand of god. They're tied to those of the mouse in the field, the eagle on the mountain, the crab in its hold, the lizard beneath its rock. The leaf that falls to the ground a thousand miles away touches your life. The impress of your foot in the soil is felt through a thousand generations." -Daniel Quinn, The Tales of Adam

"All paths lie together in the hand of god like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle's or the squirrel's or the sparrow's. All are held together." -Daniel Quinn, The Tales of Adam

"We make our journey in the company of others; the deer, the rabbit, the bison, and the quail walk before us, and the lion, the eagle, the wolf, the vulture, and the hyena walk behind us. All our paths lie together in the hand of god and none is wider than any other or favored above any other. The worm that creeps beneath your foot is making its journey across the hand of god as surely as you are." -Daniel Quinn, The Tales of Adam

"It's all one thing, you see. One thing: man and bison. One thing: grass and grasshopper. One thing: grasshopper and sparrow. One thing: sparrow and fox. One thing: fox and vulture. One thing...and its name is...fire." -Daniel Quinn, The Man Who Grew Young

"From the animist point of view, humans belong in a sacred place because they themselves are sacred. Not sacred in a special way, not more sacred than anything else, but merely as sacred as anything else--as sacred as bison or salmon or crows or crickets or bears or sunflowers." -Daniel Quinn, "Our Religions: Are they the Religions of Humanity Itself?"

"Animism is not a belief but a worldview: The world is a sacred place and we are part of it. The factuality of this statement is not the issue. To say that the world is a sacred place is to make a statement about values, not facts. It's a statement about what you mean by 'sacred,' just as 'money can't buy happiness' is a statement about what you mean by 'happiness.' To put it all very simply, animism isn't a belief system, it's a value system." -Daniel Quinn (Ishmael Community Q & A)

"All life is a circle. The atom is a circle, orbits are circles, the earth, moon, and sun are circles. The seasons are circles. The cycle of life is a circle: baby, youth, adult, elder. The sun gives life to the earth who feeds life to the trees whose seeds fall to the earth to grow new trees. We need to practice seeing the cycles that the Great Spirit gave us because this will help us more in our understanding of how things operate. We need to respect these cycles and live in harmony with them." -Rolling Thunder, Cherokee

"Tread softly, for this is holy ground. It may be, could we look with knowing eyes, this spot we stand on is Paradise." -Christina Rossetti

"A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge." -Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

"As a race, there was never one more unpracticable…They regonize their Great Spirit in rocks, trees, cataracts, and clouds, in thunder and lightning…[They believe that He exists within] every possible form in the world, animate and inanimate [and] they see Him in every place that inspires awe." -Professor Henry Schoolcraft (ethnologist of the mid-nineteenth century, quoted in The Great American Wolf, by Bruce Hampton, 31)

"...The distinction between 'life' and 'lifeless' is a human construct. Every atom in this body existed before organic life emerged 4000 million years ago. Remember our childhood as minerals, as lava, as rocks? Rocks contain the potentiality to weave themselves into such stuff as this. We are the rocks dancing. Why do we look down on them with such a condescending air? It is they that are an immortal part of us." -John Seed, Beyond Anthropocentrism

"Every being in the universe is an expression of the Tao. It springs into existence, unconscious, perfect, free, takes on a physical body lets circumstances complete it. That is why every being spontaneously honors the Tao." -Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching

"I believe in God, only I spell it Nature." -Frank Lloyd Wright