Top 160 Diane Ackerman Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Revered as God’s servants, the bees they lure provide mead and honey for the table and beeswax candles for church services, which is why many churches planted linden trees in their courtyards. The bee-church connection became so strong that once, at the turn of the fifteenth century, the villagers of Mazowsze passed a law condemning honey thieves and hive vandals.”

— Diane Ackerman

102. “We’re losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet’s health and our own.”

— Diane Ackerman

103. “Adventure is not something you travel to find. It’s something you take with you, or you’re not going to find it when you arrive.”

— Diane Ackerman

104. “Every moment is great, we were taught, every moment s unique.”

— Diane Ackerman

105. “The knowing, I told myself, is only a vapor of the mind, and yet it can wreck havok with one’s sanity.”

— Diane Ackerman

106. “For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.”

— Diane Ackerman

107. “We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they’re also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you’ve experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.”

— Diane Ackerman

108. “Above all, we ask the poet to teach us a way of seeing...”

— Diane Ackerman

109. “Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.”

— Diane Ackerman

110. “The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.”

— Diane Ackerman

111. “I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive.”

— Diane Ackerman

112. “I like handling newborn animals. Fallen into life from an unmappable world, they are the ultimate immigrants, full of wonder and confusion.”

— Diane Ackerman

113. “Writing is my form of celebration and prayer.”

— Diane Ackerman

114. “The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven’s sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie’s jazz. Audrey Hepburn’s wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.”

— Diane Ackerman

115. “There is a way of beholding nature that is itself a form of prayer.”

— Diane Ackerman

116. “What a lonely species we are, searching for signals of life from other galaxies, adopting companion animals, visiting parks and zoos to commune with other beasts. In the process, we discover our shared identity.”

— Diane Ackerman

117. “But, without meaning to exactly, one still tends to conjure up scary scenarios, their pathos or salvation, as if one could endure a trauma before it occurred, in small manageable doses, as a sort of inoculation. Are there homeopathic degrees of anguish?”

— Diane Ackerman

118. “Books are borrowed minds, and because they capture the soul of a people, they explore and celebrate all it means to be human.”

— Diane Ackerman

119. “An animal on a leash is not tamed by the owner. The owner is extending himself through the leash to that part of his personality which is pure dog, that part of him which just wants to eat, sleep, bark, hump chairs, wet the floor in joy, and drink out of a toilet bowl.”

— Diane Ackerman

120. “One of the most remarkable things about Antonina was her determination to include play, animals, wonder, curiosity, marvel, and a wide blaze of innocence in a household where all dodged the ambient dangers, horrors, and uncertainties. That takes a special stripe of bravery rarely valued in wartime. While.”

— Diane Ackerman

121. “Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things.”

— Diane Ackerman

122. “Tranquillity hides in small spaces, and when found needs to be treasured, because you know it’s a phantom that will slip away again.”

— Diane Ackerman

123. “Though we marry as adults, we don’t marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we’re creative.”

— Diane Ackerman

124. “If organs as elemental as brain and heart can be persuaded to regenerate, and others, like ears and corneas, can be fashioned from living ink, how will that change us as a species? Will the printing of organs affect our evolution? Could it alter our genes?”

— Diane Ackerman

125. “I try to give myself passionately, totally, to whatever I’m observing, with as much affectionate curiosity as I can muster, as a means of understanding a little better what being human is.”

— Diane Ackerman

126. “So before I start work on a book, I’m like a pregnant mole – I obsessively tidy and order my closets and everything in my study. Because there’s such a cascade of images and ideas that I’m grapping with mentally, I couldn’t also be in a chaotic setting.”

— Diane Ackerman

127. “Only by fumbling with countless bits of knowledge, and then ignoring most of it, does a creative mind craft something original.”

— Diane Ackerman

128. “In Manhattan last month I heard a woman borrowing the jargon of junkies to say to another, ‘Want to do some chocolate?’”

— Diane Ackerman

129. “According to Jan, “The personality of animals will develop according to how you raise, train, educate them – you can’t generalize about them. Just like people who own dogs and cats will tell you, no two are exactly alike. Who knew that a rabbit could learn to kiss a human, open doors, or give us reminders about dinnertime?” Wicek’s.”

— Diane Ackerman

130. “Not much is known about alligators. They don’t train well. And they’re unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories.”

— Diane Ackerman

131. “Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.”

— Diane Ackerman

132. “Selves will accumulate when one isn’t looking, and they don’t always act wisely or well.”

— Diane Ackerman

133. “For the longest time I didn’t realize I was creative – I just thought I was strange.”

— Diane Ackerman

134. “We evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling.”

— Diane Ackerman

135. “They spend their whole lives yelling at the world and each other. They yell at their loved ones, they yell at their enemies, they yell at their dinner, they yell at the big bustling world.”

— Diane Ackerman

136. “We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we’re creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they’re wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.”

— Diane Ackerman

137. “One of the keystones of romantic love – and also of the ecstatic religion practiced by mystics – is the powerful desire to become one with the beloved.”

— Diane Ackerman

138. “I hate the fearful trimming of possibilities that age brings.”

— Diane Ackerman

139. “And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can’t really share the enormity of our lives.”

— Diane Ackerman

140. “There is that unique moment when one confronts something new and astonishment begins.”

— Diane Ackerman

141. “Don’t think of night as the absence of day; think of it as a kind of freedom. Turned away from our sun, we see the dawning of far flung galaxies. We are no longer sun blinded to the star coated universe we inhabit.”

— Diane Ackerman

142. “The well of nature is full today. Time to go outside and take a drink.”

— Diane Ackerman

143. “I’m an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it’s also tonic and deeply spiritual, glorifying the smallest life-form and embracing the most distant stars.”

— Diane Ackerman

144. “All our senses feed the brain, and if it diets mainly on cruelty and suffering, how can it remain healthy? Change that diet, on purpose, train mentally to refocus the mind, and one nourishes the brain.”

— Diane Ackerman

145. “One of the things I like best about animals in the wild is that they’re always off on some errand. They have appointments to keep. It’s only we humans who wonder what we’re here for.”

— Diane Ackerman

146. “Who you are isn’t tied solely to what you say, even though it may feel that way to you now.”

— Diane Ackerman

147. “The Underground Peasant Movement adopted the slogan of “As little, as late, and as bad as possible,” and set about sabotaging deliveries.”

— Diane Ackerman

148. “If we mammals don’t get something to eat every day or two, our temperature drops, all our signs fall off, and we begin to starve. Living at biological red alert, it’s not surprising how obsessed we are with food; I’m just amazed we don’t pace and fret about it all the time.”

— Diane Ackerman

149. “It’s essential to tailor rehab to what impassions someone. The brain gradually learns by riveting its attention-through endless repetitions.”

— Diane Ackerman

150. “Adult bats don’t weigh much. They’re mainly fur and appetite.”

— Diane Ackerman