Top 160 Diane Ackerman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”

— Diane Ackerman

2. “Don’t just live the length of your life – live the width of it as well.”

— Diane Ackerman

3. “In the absence of touching and being touched, people of all ages can sicken and grow touched starved. Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.”

— Diane Ackerman

4. “Love is like a batik created from many emotional colors, it is a fabric whose pattern and brightness may vary.”

— Diane Ackerman

5. “Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.”

— Diane Ackerman

6. “No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.”

— Diane Ackerman

7. “Play is our brain’s favorite way of learning.”

— Diane Ackerman

8. “The senses don’t just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern.”

— Diane Ackerman

9. “Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.”

— Diane Ackerman

10. “I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace.”

— Diane Ackerman

11. “I don’t want to be a passenger in my own life.”

— Diane Ackerman

12. “Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we’re reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can’t even talk or think about it directly.”

— Diane Ackerman

13. “Fear is danger to your body, but disgust is danger to your soul.”

— Diane Ackerman

14. “Smell is the mute sense, the one without words.”

— Diane Ackerman

15. “Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth.”

— Diane Ackerman

16. “Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else.”

— Diane Ackerman

17. “Because IQ tests favor memory skills and logic, overlooking artistic creativity, insight, resiliency, emotional reserves, sensory gifts, and life experience, they can’t really predict success, let alone satisfaction.”

— Diane Ackerman

18. “Mystery causes a mental itch, which the brain tries to soothe with the balm of reasonable talk.”

— Diane Ackerman

19. “Like love, travel makes you innocent again.”

— Diane Ackerman

20. “Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.”

— Diane Ackerman

21. “Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain, and yet they are color and clarify everything, they can stain the mind or warp the feelings.”

— Diane Ackerman

22. “Part of the irony of environmentalism is questing for solutions when you know you’re part of the problem.”

— Diane Ackerman

23. “We did it because it was the right thing to do.”

— Diane Ackerman

24. “The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime’s loves.”

— Diane Ackerman

25. “The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sunstruck hills every day.”

— Diane Ackerman

26. “When I go biking, I am mentally far far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else’s heart.”

— Diane Ackerman

27. “When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor. What we call “white” is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space. The prism sets them free. Love is the white light of emotion.”

— Diane Ackerman

28. “Wonder is a bulky emotion. When you let it fill your heart and mind, there isn’t room for anxiety, distress or anything else.”

— Diane Ackerman

29. “What is erotic? The acrobatic play of the imagination. The sea of memories in which we bathe. The way we caress and worship things with our eyes. Our willingness to be stirred by the sight of the voluptuous. What is erotic is our passion for the liveliness of life.”

— Diane Ackerman

30. “Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.”

— Diane Ackerman

31. “Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.”

— Diane Ackerman

32. “Give a man enough rope and he’ll wrap himself around your little finger.”

— Diane Ackerman

33. “Happiness doesn’t require laughter, only well-being and a sense that the world is breaking someone else’s heart, not mine.”

— Diane Ackerman

34. “There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.”

— Diane Ackerman

35. “We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.”

— Diane Ackerman

36. “Complexity excites the mind, and order rewards it. In the garden, one finds both, including vanishingly small orders too complex to spot, and orders so vast the mind struggles to embrace them.”

— Diane Ackerman

37. “Writer’s block is a luxury most people with deadlines don’t have.”

— Diane Ackerman

38. “If cynicism is inevitable as one ages, so is the yearning for innocence. To children heaven is being an adult, and to adults heaven is being children again.”

— Diane Ackerman

39. “Horses have made civilization possible.”

— Diane Ackerman

40. “Without memories we wouldn’t know who we are, how we once were, who we’d like to be in the memorable future. We are the sum of our memories.”

— Diane Ackerman

41. “Nothing reveals more about the inner life of a people than their arts...”

— Diane Ackerman

42. “These days, startling though the thought is, we control our own legacy. We’re not passive, we’re not helpless. We’re earth-movers. We can become Earth-restorers and Earth-guardians. We still have time and talent, and we have a great many choices. As I said at the beginning of this mental caravan, our mistakes are legion, but our imagination is immeasurable.”

— Diane Ackerman

43. “It’s animal by animal that you save a species.”

— Diane Ackerman

44. “Perversion is the erotic form of hatred.”

— Diane Ackerman

45. “As the most social apes, we inhabit a mirror-world in which every important relationship, whether with spouse, friend or child, shapes the brain, which in turn shapes our relationships.”

— Diane Ackerman

46. “Who would drink from a cup when they can drink from the source?”

— Diane Ackerman

47. “I can’t breathe,” she said. “I feel like I’m drowning in a gray sea, like they’re flooding the whole city, washing away our past and people, dashing everything from the face of the earth.” Jammed.”

— Diane Ackerman

48. “Love is the white light of emotion.”

— Diane Ackerman

49. “All relationships change the brain – but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.”

— Diane Ackerman

50. “So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there’s a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.”

— Diane Ackerman