John G. Neihardt > Quotes

“And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.”
― John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition

“Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.”
― John G Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition

“How could men get fat by being bad and starve by being good? I thought and thought about my vision, and it made me very sad.”
― John G Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition

“I could see that the Wasichus did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation’s hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. They had forgotten that the earth was their mother.10 This”
― John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition

“When the ceremony was over, everybody felt a great deal better, for it had been a day of fun. They were better able now to see the greenness of the world, the wideness of the sacred day, the colors of the earth, and to set these in their minds.”
― John G Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition

“When I started for the head of navigation a friend asked me what I expected to find on the trip. "Some more of myself," I answered. And, after all, that is the Great Discovery.”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“growing power is rooted in mystery like the night, and reaches lightward. Seeds sprout in the darkness of the ground before they know the summer and the day. In the night of the womb the spirit quickens into flesh.”
― John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition

“A goal, in itself, is an empty thing; all the virtue lies in the moving toward the goal.”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth,—you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.11”
― John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition

“These things I shall remember by the way, and often they may seem to be the very tale itself, as when I was living them in happiness and sorrow. But now that I can see it all as from a lonely hilltop, I know it was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it; of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people’s heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered; and of a people’s dream that died in bloody snow.”
― John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition

“I think Job and I understand each other better now. It was not the boils, but the free advice!”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“I felt the sense of time and self drop away from me. No now, no to-morrow, no yesterday, no I! Only eternity, one vast whole—sun-shot, star-sprent, love-filled, changeless. And in it all, one spot of consciousness more acute than other spots; and that was the something that had eaten hugely, and that now felt the inward-flung glory of it all; the swooning, half-voluptuous sense of awe and wonder, the rippling, shimmering, universal joy. And then suddenly and without shock—like the shifting of the wood smoke—the mood veered, and there was nothing but I. Space and eternity were I—vast projections of myself, tingling with my consciousness to the remotest fringe of the outward swinging atom-drift; through immeasurable night, pierced capriciously with shafts of paradoxic day; through and beyond the awful circle of yearless duration, my ego lived and knew itself and thrilled with the glory of being. The slowly revolving Milky Way was only a glory within me; the great woman-star jeweling the summit of a cliff, was only an ecstasy within me; the murmuring of the river out in the dark was only the singing of my heart; and the deep, deep blue of the heavens was only the splendid color of my soul.”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“Capricious river draughts, sucking up the damp defile, whipped upward into the blistering sunlight gray spiral towers that leaped into opal fires and dissolved in showers of diamond and pearl and amethyst.”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“Scotland, say, and in Montana?" I did not. "Well," he proceeded, "over in Scotland when a feller sees a sheepman coming down the road with his sheep, he says: 'Behold the gentle shepherd with his fleecy flock!' That's poetry. Now in Montana, that same feller says, when he sees the same feller coming over a ridge with the same sheep: 'Look at that crazy blankety-blank with his woolies!' That's fact. You mind what I say, or you'll get spurred.”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“Is there any land
So far and strange it cannot understand
The drumming thunder and the singing rain?
And then he came- he came!”
― John G. Neihardt, The Twilight of the Sioux

“Many-colored mosses, sickly green, pale, feverish red, yellow like fear, black like despair, purple like the lips of a strangled man, clung there.”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“How can I know that I know anything?
The coming of the grasses in the spring-
Is it not strange so wonderful a tale
Is really true? Did mornings ever fail,
Or sleeping Earth forget the time to grow?
How do the generations come and go?
They are, and are not. I am half afraid
To think of what strange wonders all is made!
And shall I doubt another if I see?”
― John G. Neihardt, The Twilight of the Sioux

“But the Missouri—my brother—is the eternal Fighting Man!”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“Flung down a preliminary mile of steep descent, choked in between soaring walls of rock four hundred yards apart, innumerable crystal tons rushed down ninety feet in one magnificent plunge. You saw the long bent crest—shimmering with the changing colors of a peacock's back—smooth as a lake when all winds sleep; and then the mighty river was snuffed out in gulfs of angry gray. Capricious river draughts, sucking up the damp defile, whipped upward into the blistering sunlight gray spiral towers that leaped into opal fires and dissolved in showers of diamond and pearl and amethyst.”
― John G. Neihardt, The River and I

“Death became afraid
Before the dancing people so arrayed
In vision of the deathless. Hundreds burned
With holiness”
― John G. Neihardt, The Twilight of the Sioux

“Sullenly a gale
That blustered rainless up the Bozeman Trail
Was brining June again ; but not the dear
Deep-bosomed mother of a hemisphere
That other regions cherish. Flat of breast,
More passionate than loving up the West
A stern June strode, lean suckler of the lean,
Her rag-and-tatter robe of faded green
Blown dustily about her.”
― John G. Neihardt, The Twilight of the Sioux