Ciara > Ciara's Quotes

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“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 feeling 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 from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein

“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
― Voltaire

“The calling of our time appears to me to be a calling for nothing less than a reconnection of human beings to the web of life. It is a calling to co-create some kind of bridge from this collapsing paradigm to some new way of being on Earth in which we humbly return ourselves to being just one part of the web of life, rather than the crushers of the web itself.”
― Dean Walker, The Impossible Conversation: Choosing Reconnection and Resilience at the End of Business as Usual

“This is the work that we all have done everything in our power to avoid.”
― Dean Walker, The Impossible Conversation: Choosing Reconnection and Resilience at the End of Business as Usual

“We must throw out the delusion of infinite growth on a finite planet. There are alternative measures of a good life.”
― Dean Walker, The Impossible Conversation: Choosing Reconnection and Resilience at the End of Business as Usual

“Most people in the world do not fly in airplanes. 2˚C and mitigation are not about population. It is about US, the biggest consumers, reducing our consumption and emissions immediately.”
― Dean Walker, The Impossible Conversation: Choosing Reconnection and Resilience at the End of Business as Usual

“Ultimately, we must escape the shackles of a twentieth century mindset of business as usual, if we are ever to resolve twenty-first century challenges. This will demand leadership, courage, innovative thinking, engaged teams and difficult choices.”
― Dean Walker, The Impossible Conversation: Choosing Reconnection and Resilience at the End of Business as Usual

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose”
― Charles Bukowski and Carl Weissner

“Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their
lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn't so.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“The definition of “power” we have embraced as a result of our enculturation in an industrial growth society serves only to destroy us and the Earth community. When we are willing to mine the dark gold of the personal shadow, our definition of power is transformed by love. When we can come to love what the ego considers the worst in us, we become mercifully and skillfully equipped to love what appears unlovable and intolerable in our world.”
― Carolyn Baker, Dark Gold: The Human Shadow and the Global Crisis

“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Your silence will not protect you.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose
the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution,
but more usually
we must do battle where we are standing.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order for us to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.”
― Vandana Shiva

“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.”
― Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

“Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.”
― Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace

“If you are doing the right thing for the earth, she's giving you great company.”
― Vandana Shiva

“On a planet with 300 million species and 7 billion humans, one man determining the future is a dangerous idea. It is dangerous for the Earth, because the anthropocentric, reductionist, and mechanistic assumptions by which Gates is guided are at the root of the ecological crisis that has brought us to the brink.”
― Vandana Shiva, One Earth, One Humanity vs. the 1%

“We have been led to identify ourselves with our destructive side - and that which we have become identified, we overvalue and empower. This has been happening for many generations, reinforcing this harmful image of ourselves.”
― Arkan Lushwala, The Time of the Black Jaguar: An Offering of Indigenous Wisdom for the Continuity of Life on Earth

“The business of grabbing and money-making, through a violent extractive economy that the 1% have built, is burdening the earth and humanity with unbearable and non-sustainable costs, and has brought us to the brink of extinction. We do not have to escape from the earth; we have to escape from the illusions that enslave our minds and make extinction look inevitable.”
― Vandana Shiva, Oneness vs The 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom