Top 70 Kent Nerburn Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We live in a world alive with holy moments. We need only take the time to bring these moments into the light.”

— Kent Nerburn

2. “We’re conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments. But great moments often catch us unaware – beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one.”

— Kent Nerburn

3. “Life is an endlessly creative experience, and we are shaping ourselves at every moment by every decision we make.”

— Kent Nerburn

4. “Our life is a work of art. We must seek always to be its artist.”

— Kent Nerburn

5. “Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance and none can say why some fields will blossom while others lay brown beneath the August sun.”

— Kent Nerburn

6. “Remember that you don’t choose love. Love chooses you. All you can really do is accept it for all its mystery when it comes into your life. Feel the way it fills you to overflowing, then reach out and give it away.”

— Kent Nerburn

7. “Love has its own time, its own season, and its own reasons from coming and going. You cannot bribe it or coerce it or reason it into staying. You can only embrace it when it arrives and give it away when it comes to you.”

— Kent Nerburn

8. “The true measure of your education is not what you know, but how you share what you know with others.”

— Kent Nerburn

9. “It is not our task to judge the worthiness of our path; it is our task to walk our path with worthiness.”

— Kent Nerburn

10. “It is much easier to become a father than to be one.”

— Kent Nerburn

11. “Our brightest dreams and our greatest fears are just over the horizon.”

— Kent Nerburn

12. “When you are here, you are here. When you are gone, you are gone. It isn’t a problem to be gone, so long as you are really here when you’re here.”

— Kent Nerburn

13. “In a perfect world perhaps we would all see more clearly. But this is not a perfect world, and it is enough to hope that each of us will share our talents, and find the balance between greed and benevolence that will allow us to live and thrive and help the world around us grow.”

— Kent Nerburn

14. “You need to understand this. We did not think we owned the land. The land was part of us. We didn’t even know about owning the land. It is like talking about owning your grandmother – you can’t own your grandmother. She just is your grandmother. Why would you talk about owning her?”

— Kent Nerburn

15. “The Buddhists have a story about blind men trying to describe an elephant by feeling it’s various parts, and each describes the elephant according to the part he touched. That is the way we can hope to know God.”

— Kent Nerburn

16. “We Indians know about silence,” he said. “We aren’t afraid of it. In fact, to us it is more powerful than words.”

— Kent Nerburn

17. “Something precious is lost if we rush headlong into the details of life without pausing for a moment to pay homage to the mystery of life and the gift of another day.”

— Kent Nerburn

18. “Money is central to our lives. Yet money is not of central importance. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the lasting values that make life worth living.”

— Kent Nerburn

19. “Let us put our minds together and see what kind of life we can make for our children.” – Sitting Bull I.”

— Kent Nerburn

20. “In some corner of your life, you know more about something than anyone else on earth. The true measure of your education is not what you know, but how you share what you know with others.”

— Kent Nerburn

21. “Care less for your harvest than for how it is shared and your life will have meaning and your heart will have peace.”

— Kent Nerburn

22. “Our actions in this world, and our ability to rise above the limits of our own self-interest, live on far beyond us and play their humble part in shaping a world of spirituality and peace.”

— Kent Nerburn

23. “Forgiveness is an embrace, across all barriers, against all odds, in defiance of all that is mean and petty and vindictive and cruel in this life.”

— Kent Nerburn

24. “We wake up one day and find we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days.”

— Kent Nerburn

25. “You want to know how to be like indians? Live close to the earth. Get rid of some of your things. Help each other. Talk to the creator. Be quiet more. Listen to the earth instead of building things on it all the time.”

— Kent Nerburn

26. “We may not all live holy lives, but we live in a world alive with holy moments.”

— Kent Nerburn

27. “This is not to say that becoming a father automatically makes you a good father. Fatherhood, like marriage, is a constant struggle against your limitations and self-interests. But the urge to be a perfect father is there, because your child is a perfect gift.”

— Kent Nerburn

28. “We must find a way to replace yearning for what life has withheld from us with gratitude for what we have been given.”

— Kent Nerburn

29. “Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance, and none can say while some fields will blossom and others lay brown beneath the August sun. Care for those around you. Look past your differences. Their dreams are no less than yours, their choices in life no more easily made. And give. Give in any way you can, of whatever you possess. To give is to love. To withhold is to wither. Care less for your harvest than how is shared, and your life will have meaning and your heart will have peace.”

— Kent Nerburn

30. “Great joys make us love the world. Great sadnesses make us understand the world.”

— Kent Nerburn

31. “My fatherhood made me understand my parents and to honor them more for the love they gave. My sonhood was revealed to me in its own perfection and I understood the reason the Chinese so value filiality, the responsibility of the son to honor the parents.”

— Kent Nerburn

32. “Forgiveness allows us to live in the sunlight of the present, not the darkness of the past. Forgiveness alone, of all our human actions, opens up the world to the miracle of infinite possibility.”

— Kent Nerburn

33. “I am an Indian; and while I have learned much from civilization, for which I am grateful, I have never lost my Indian sense of right and justice. I am for development and progress along social and spiritual lines, rather than those of commerce, nationalism, or efficiency. Nevertheless, so long as I live, I am an American.”

— Kent Nerburn

34. “In times past there were rituals of passage that conducted a boy into manhood, where other men passed along the wisdom and responsibilities that needed to be shared. But today we have no rituals. We are not conducted into manhood; we simply find ourselves there.”

— Kent Nerburn

35. “Once I was in Victoria, and I saw a very large house. They told me it was a bank, and that the white men place their money there to be taken care of, and that by and by they got it back, with interest. We are Indians, and we have no such bank; but when we have plenty of money or blankets, we give them away to other chiefs and people, and by and by they return them, with interest, and our hearts feel good. Our way of giving is our bank. – Maquinna Nootka Chief.”

— Kent Nerburn

36. “Do not fall prey to the false belief that mastery and domination are synonymous with manliness.”

— Kent Nerburn

37. “It is not easy for a man to be as great as a mountain or a forest. But that is why the Creator gave them to us as teachers. Now that I am old I look once more toward them for lessons, instead of trying to understand the ways of men.”

— Kent Nerburn

38. “Watch, listen, and then act, they told us. This is the way to live.”

— Kent Nerburn

39. “People should think of their words like seeds. They should plant them, then let them grow in silence. Our old people taught us that the earth is always speaking to us, but that we have to be silent to hear her.”

— Kent Nerburn

40. “We are born male. We must learn to be men.”

— Kent Nerburn

41. “This is important. Money on its most basic level is a hard fact – you either have it or you don’t. But on it’s emotional level it is purely a fiction. It becomes what you let it become.”

— Kent Nerburn

42. “Your people must learn to give up their arrogance. They are not the only ones placed on this earth. Theirs is not the only way. People have worshiped the Creator and loved their families in many ways in all places. Your people must learn to honor this.”

— Kent Nerburn

43. “Continue to contaminate your own bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste. ” – Chief Seattle Suqwamish and Duwamish T.”

— Kent Nerburn

44. “If at times my words seem angry, you must forgive me. In my mind, there is great anger. No one who has seen the suffering of our children and the tears of our grandmothers cannot be angry. But in my heart I struggle to forgive, because the land is my teacher, and the land says to forgive.”

— Kent Nerburn

45. “We humans are destined to live with our feet on the earth and our heads in the heavens, and we can never be at peace because we are pulled both ways.”

— Kent Nerburn

46. “White eyes, Nerburn. You’ve got white eyes. The boy probably left it there. This is what I mean. Watch our little children. They might get a bike and ride it, then just leave it somewhere, like that. You say they are irresponsible. They are just being like their ancestors who believed that you owned something only so long as you needed it. Then you passed it to someone else.”

— Kent Nerburn

47. “For more than two decades I have tried, honestly and respectfully, to walk the difficult line between the world of Native America and the world of those of us whose people came, willingly or otherwise, to these American shores. I have done this because I believe that we, as Americans, are poorly served by our willful avoidance of the true facts of our national experience, and also because I believe that the lives and ways of the Native American peoples have much to teach us all. It.”

— Kent Nerburn

48. “These people would ride across the land and put a flag up, then say that everything between where they started and where they put the flag belonged to them. That was like someone rowing a boat out into a lake and saying that all the water from where he started to where he turned around belonged to him. Or someone shooting an arrow into the sky and saying that all the sky up to where the arrow went belonged to him. “This is very important for you to understand. We thought these people were crazy.”

— Kent Nerburn

49. “There is something we don’t like, though. It’s when people call us Indians and then start calling sports teams and other things Indians. If we’re going to have a false name, at least let us have it and then leave it alone. Don’t start putting it on beer bottles and ice cream cartons and making it into something that embarrasses us and makes us look like fools. And don’t tell us it’s supposed to be some honor to us. We’ll decide what honors us and what doesn’t.”

— Kent Nerburn

50. “This is why we need to travel. If we don’t offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don’t lift to the horizon; our ears don’t hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in a routine that is both comfortable and limiting. We wake up one day and find that we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days.”

— Kent Nerburn