Top 80 Barry López Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”

— Barry López

2. “The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of the exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by the land as it is by genes.”

— Barry López

3. “The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.”

— Barry López

4. “The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.”

— Barry López

5. “Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”

— Barry López

6. “We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.”

— Barry López

7. “The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you.”

— Barry López

8. “One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret.”

— Barry López

9. “The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. To be indifferent is to not express love.”

— Barry López

10. “The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.”

— Barry López

11. “It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.”

— Barry López

12. “One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.”

— Barry López

13. “To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.”

— Barry López

14. “We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.”

— Barry López

15. “If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”

— Barry López

16. “The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.”

— Barry López

17. “Its only boundary was the horizon, the sill of the sky, separating what the eye could see from what the mind might imagine.”

— Barry López

18. “Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.”

— Barry López

19. “How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but in oneself? There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”

— Barry López

20. “Traveling encourages the revision of received wisdoms and the shedding of prejudices. It turns the mind toward a consideration of context and releases it from the dictatorship of absolute truths about humanity.”

— Barry López

21. “To go in search of what once was is to postpone the difficulty of living with what is.”

— Barry López

22. “To explore is to travel without a hypothesis.”

— Barry López

23. “You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”

— Barry López

24. “There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.”

— Barry López

25. “The Pacific is twice the size of the Atlantic, a comparison perhaps too incomprehensible to convey meaning. If in a cartoon, Mount Everest were placed on the floor of the Mariana Trench south of Guam, its peak would fall 6,800 feet short of the surface of the Pacific.”

— Barry López

26. “We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this – and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.”

— Barry López

27. “For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.”

— Barry López

28. “The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.”

— Barry López

29. “It is, after all, not man but the universe that is subtle.”

— Barry López

30. “Theres so much to be afraid of.”

— Barry López

31. “What perished with their cultures were their unique ideas of what it meant to be courteous, reverent, courageous, and just. What disappeared with them were their thoughts about what could be expected to be going on in the places into which we cannot see. As our own cultures continue to unfold around the riptides of aggressive commerce and heedless development, it seems these thoughts might have been good things to have made note of.”

— Barry López

32. “Art’s underlying strength is that it does not intend to be literal. It presents a metaphor and leaves the viewer or listener to interpret. It is giving in to art, not trying to divine its meaning, that brings the viewer or listener the deepest measures of satisfaction.”

— Barry López

33. “We, all of us, look back over our lives, trying to make sense of what happened, to see what enduring threads might be there.”

— Barry López

34. “Each place is itself only, and nowhere repeated.”

— Barry López

35. “There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”

— Barry López

36. “You can’t learn anything from saguaro cactus, from ocotillo. They are just passing through; their roots, their much heralded dormancy in the dry season, these are only illusions of permanence. They know even less than you do.”

— Barry López

37. “One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no definitive answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”

— Barry López

38. “I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.”

— Barry López

39. “Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?”

— Barry López

40. “It does not demean men to want to be what they imagine the wolf to be, but it does demean them to kill the animal for it.”

— Barry López

41. “No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself.”

— Barry López

42. “I lay there knowing something eerie ties us to the world of animals. Sometimes the animals pull you backward into it. You share hunger and fear with them like salt in blood.”

— Barry López

43. “Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?”

— Barry López

44. “When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I’m trying to do. I’m frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.”

— Barry López

45. “If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.”

— Barry López

46. “Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint.”

— Barry López

47. “Because you have seen something doesn’t mean you can explain it. Differing interpretations will always abound, even when good minds come to bear. The kernel of indisputable information is a dot in space; interpretations grow out of the desire to make this point a line, to give it direction. The directions in which it can be sent, the uses to which it can be put by a culturally, professionally, and geographically diverse society are almost without limit. The possibilities make good scientists chary.”

— Barry López

48. “The attempt to close the gap between what is known and what IS, is the temptation behind the apple in Genesis.”

— Barry López

49. “In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.”

— Barry López

50. “People think that if you’ve written a book and somebody’s given you a pat on the back then, you know, it’s all – you’re all settled, you know? You’re going to be fine. I know that if I’m not confused, and really afraid, my work isn’t going to be any good.”

— Barry López