Joni James > Joni's Quotes

“It is those who have compassion for all life who will best safeguard the life of man. Those who become aroused only when man is endangered become aroused too late. We cannot make the world uninhabitable for other forms of life and have it habitable for ourselves. It is the conservationist who is concerned with the welfare of all the land and life of the country, who, in the end, will do most to maintain the world as a fit place for human existence.”
― Edwin Way Teale

“As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. Indigenous humans have always been sane because they have always been mystic. They permit the twilight.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”
― Emerson

“One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.”
― Loren Eiseley

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

“The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.”
― Terry Tempest Williams

“What is real to me is the power of our awareness when we are focused on something beyond ourselves. It is a shaft of light shining in a dark corner. Our ability to shift our perceptions and seek creative alternatives to the conondrums of modernity is in direct proportion to our empathy. Can we imagine, witness, and ultimately feel the suffering of another?”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

“How do we remain faithful to our own spiritual imagination and not betray what we know in our own bodies? The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

“There is no one true church, no one chosen people.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

“The Eyes of the Future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert

“The mind creates those things that exist.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell

“I wonder how it is we have come to this place in our society where art and nature are spoke in terms of what is optional, the pastime and concern of the elite?”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

“Our kinship with Earth must be maintained; otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

“If you take away all the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for the rain.”
― Terry Tempest Williams

“People talk about medium. What is your medium? My medium as a writer has been dirt, clay, sand--what I could touch, hold, stand on, and stand for--Earth. My medium has been Earth. Earth in correspondence with my mind.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

“What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

“The story of the Utah prairie dog is the story of the range of our compassion. If we can extend our idea of community to include the lowliest of creatures, call them 'the untouchables', then we will indeed be closer to a path of peace and tolerance. if we cannot accommodate 'the other', the shadow we will see on our own home ground will be the forecast of our own species' extended winter of the soul.”
― Terry Tempest Williams

“To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.”
― Terry Tempest Williams

“[I]f you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. We are talking about the body of the beloved, not real estate.”
― Terry Tempest Williams

“While wandering a deserted beach at dawn, stagnant in my work, I saw a man in the distance bending and throwing as he walked the endless stretch toward me. As he came near, I could see that he was throwing starfish, abandoned on the sand by the tide, back into the sea. When he was close enough I asked him why he was working so hard at this strange task. He said that the sun would dry the starfish and they would die. I said to him that I thought he was foolish. There were thousands of starfish on miles and miles of beach. One man alone could never make a difference. He smiled as he picked up the next starfish. Hurling it far into the sea he said, "It makes a difference for this one." I abandoned my writing and spent the morning throwing starfish.”
― Loren Eiseley

“It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.”
― Loren Eiseley

“Who will bear witness to these small islands and oases of wildness as land is divided and sold to become strip malls, housing developments,and parking lots? What happens to the natural history here? We must bear witness.”
― Joni L. James, Dancing With Herons: Bearing Witness to Local Natural History