Jaya > Jaya's Quotes

“A sense of calm came over me. More and more often I found myself thinking, "This is where I belong. This is what I came into this world to do.”
― Jane Goodall

“We have so far to go to realize our human potential for compassion, altruism, and love.”
― Jane Goodall, Harvest for Hope

“If we do not do something to help these creatures, we make a mockery of the whole concept of justice.”
― Jane Goodall

“And if we dare to look into those eyes, then we shall feel their suffering in our hearts. More and more people have seen that appeal and felt it in their hearts. All around the world there is an awakening of understanding and compassion, and understanding that reaches out to help the suffering animals in their vanishing homelands. That embraces hungry, sick, and desperate human beings, people who are starving while the fortunate among us have so much more than we need. And if, one by one, we help them, the hurting animals, the desperate humans, then together we shall alleviate so much of the hunger, fear, and pain in the world. Together we can bring change to the world, gradually replacing fear and hatred with compassion and love. Love for all living beings.”
― Jane Goodall

“Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.”
― Jane Goodall

“We can't leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise the standard of living for 80% of the world's people, while bringing it down considerably for the 20% who are destroying our natural resources.”
― Jane Goodall

“I think the best evenings are when we have messages, things that make us think, but we can also laugh and enjoy each other's company. ”
― Jane Goodall

“I became totally absorbed into this forest existence. It was an unparalleled period when aloneness was a way of life; a perfect opportunity, it might seem, for meditating on the meaning of existence and my role in it all. But I was far too busy learning about the chimpanzees'lives to worry about the meaning of my own. I had gone to Gombe to accomplish a specific goal, not to pursue my early preoccupation with philosophy and religion. Nevertheless, those months at Gombe helped to shape the person I am today-I would have been insensitive indeed if the wonder and the endless fascination of my new world had not had a major impact on my thinking. All the time I was getting closer to animals and nature, and as a result, closer to myself and more and more in tune with the spiritual power that I felt all around. For those who have experienced the joy of being alone with nature there is really little need for me to say much more; for those who have not, no words of mine can even describe the powerful, almost mystical knowledge of beauty and eternity that come, suddenly, and all unexpected. The beauty was always there, but moments of true awareness were rare. They would come, unannounced; perhaps when I was watching the pale flush preceding dawn; or looking up through the rustling leaves of some giant forest tree into the greens and browns and the black shadows and the occasionally ensured bright fleck of blue sky; or when I stood, as darkness fell, with one hand on the still warm trunk of a tree and looked at the sparkling of an early moon on the never still, softly sighing water of Lake Tanganyika.”
― Jane Goodall

“Thousands of people who say they love animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been utterly deprived of everything that could make their lives worth living and who endured the awful suffering and the terror of the abattoirs.”
― Jane Goodall

“Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?”
― Jane Goodall

“....I understood why those who had lived through war or economic disasters, and who had built for themselves a good life and a high standard of living, were rightly proud to be able to provide for their children those things which they themselves had not had. And why their children, inevitably, took those things for granted. It meant that new values and new expectations had crept into our societies along with new standards of living. Hence the materialistic and often greedy and selfish lifestyle of so many young people in the Western world, especially in the United States.”
― Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey

“Lasting change is a series of compromises. And compromise is all right, as long your values don't change.”
― Jane Goodall

“Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other.”
― Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey

“And always I have this feeling--which may not be true at all--that I am being used as a messenger.”
― Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey

“...it honestly didn't matter how we humans got to be the way we are, whether evolution or special creation was responsible. What mattered and mattered desperately was our future development. Were we going to go on destroying God's creation, fighting each other, hurting the other creatures of the His planet?”
― jane goodall

“It is these undeniable qualities of human love and compassion and self-sacrifice that give me hope for the future. We are, indeed, often cruel and evil. Nobody can deny this. We gang up on each one another, we torture each other, with words as well as deeds, we fight, we kill. But we are also capable of the most noble, generous, and heroic behavior.”
― Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey

“We have a responsibility toward the other life-forms of our planet whose continued existence is threatened by the thoughtless behavior of our own human species. . . . Environmental responsibility – for if there is no God, then, obviously, it is up to us to put things right.”
― Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey

“And I thought how sad it was that, for all our sophisticated intellect, for all our noble aspirations, our aggressive behavior was not just similar in many ways to that of the chimpanzees – it was even worse. Worse because human beings have the potential to rise above their baser instincts, whereas chimpanzees probably do not.”
― Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey

“Cultural speciation had been crippling to human moral and spiritual growth. It had hindered freedom of thought, limited our thinking, imprisoned us in the cultures into which we had been born. . . . These cultural mind prisons. . . . Cultural speciation was clearly a barrier to world peace. So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the ‘global village’ we would propagate prejudice and ignorance.”
― Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey

“Farm animals are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined and, despite having been bred as domestic slaves, they are individual beings in their own right. As such, they deserve our respect. And our help. Who will plead for them if we are silent? Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been treated so with little respect and kindness just to make more meat.”
― Jane Goodall

“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
― Jane Goodall

“Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don't believe is right. ”
― Jane Goodall

“One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun.”
― Jane Goodall

“The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves.”
― Jane Goodall

“Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, we will help. Only if we help, we shall be saved.”
― Jane Goodall, Jane Goodall: 40 Years at Gombe

“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.”
― Jane Goodall

“We have the choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place--or not to bother”
― Jane Goodall

“In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes? Yes.”
― Jane Goodall

“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
― Jane Goodall

“The least I can do is speak out for the hundreds of chimpanzees who, right now, sit hunched, miserable and without hope, staring out with dead eyes from their metal prisons. They cannot speak for themselves.”
― Jane Goodall