Top 200 Robin Wall Kimmerer Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

Featured in: Nature Quotes

2. “In some Native languages the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

Featured in: Nature Quotes, Plant Quotes

3. “In indigenous ways of knowing, it is understood that each living being has a particular role to play. Every being is endowed with certain gifts, its own intelligence, its own spirit, its own story. Our stories tell us that the Creator gave these to us, as original instructions. The foundation of education is to discover that gift within us and learn to use it well.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

4. “Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

5. “Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

6. “We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earth’s beings.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

7. “The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

8. “Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

9. “Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it – grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

10. “This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden – so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

11. “To love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

12. “If citizenship is a matter of shared beliefs, then I believe in the democracy of species. If citizenship means an oath of loyalty to a leader, then I choose the leader of the trees. If good citizens agree to uphold the laws of the nation, then I choose natural law, the law of reciprocity, of regeneration, of mutual flourishing.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

13. “What is the duty of humans? If gifts and responsibilities are one, then asking “What is our responsibility?” is the same as asking “What is our gift?” It is said that only humans have the capacity for gratitude. This is among our gifts.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

14. “The land knows you, even when you are lost.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

15. “Transformation is not accomplished by tentative wading at the edge.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

16. “We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

17. “Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

18. “If we are looking for models of self-sustaining communities, we need look no further than an old-growth forest. Or the old-growth cultures they raised in symbiosis with them.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

19. “I want to stand by the river in my finest dress. I want to sing, strong and hard, and stomp my feet with a hundred others so that the waters hum with our happiness. I want to dance for the renewal of the world.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

20. “It was through her actions of reciprocity, the give and take with the land, that the original immigrant became indigenous. For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

21. “It’s not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

22. “Isn’t this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

23. “That September pairing of purple and gold is lived reciprocity; its wisdom is that the beauty of one is illuminated by the radiance of the other. Science and art, matter and spirit, indigenous knowledge and Western science – can they be goldenrod and asters for each other? When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary color, to make something beautiful in response.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

24. “Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion – until we teach them not to.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

25. “Suppression of our natural responses to disaster is part of the disease of our time. The refusal to acknowledge these responses causes a dangerous splitting. It divorces our mental calculations from our intuitive, emotional, and biological embeddedness in the matrix of life. That split allows us passively to acquiesce in the preparations for our own demise.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

26. “If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

27. “The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

28. “When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

29. “All powers have two sides, the power to create and the power to destroy. We must recognize them both, but invest our gifts on the side of creation.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

30. “For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

31. “A teacher comes, they say, when you are ready. And if you ignore its presence, it will speak to you more loudly. But you have to be quiet to hear.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

32. “Science can be a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species that is rivaled only by the observations of traditional knowledge holders. It can be a path to kinship.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

33. “One gram of moss from the forest floor, a piece about the size of a muffin, would harbour 150,000 protozoa, 132,000 tardigrades, 3,000 springtails, 800 rotifers, 500 nematodes, 400 mites, and 200 fly larvae. These numbers tell us something about the astounding quantity of life in a handful of moss.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

34. “I love my country too, and its hopes for freedom and justice. But the boundaries of what I honor are bigger than the republic. Let us pledge reciprocity with the living world.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

35. “Trees constitute the environmental quality committee – running air and water purification service 24-7. They’re on every task force, from the historical society picnic to the highway department, school board, and library. When it comes to civic beautification, they alone create the crimson fall with little recognition.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

36. “We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

37. “The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world. Individuality is cherished and nurtured, because, in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

38. “I dream of a world guided by a lens of stories rooted in the revelations of science and framed with an indigenous worldview – stories in which matter and spirit are both given voice.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

39. “One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

40. “Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable. Ceremonies transcend the boundaries of the individual and resonate beyond the human realm. These acts of reverence are powerfully pragmatic. These are ceremonies that magnify life.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

41. “Wealth among traditional people is measured by having enough to give away.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

42. “Refusal to participate is a moral choice. Water is a gift for all, not meant to be bought and sold. Don’t buy it. When food has been wrenched from the earth, depleting the soil and poisoning our relatives in the name of higher yields, don’t buy it.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

43. “Ruined land was accepted as the collateral damage of progress.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

44. “Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

45. “Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection “species loneliness” – a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors. It’s no wonder that naming was the first job the Creator gave Nanabozho.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

46. “The Honorable Harvest asks us to give back, in reciprocity, for what we have been given. Reciprocity helps resolve the moral tension of taking a life by giving in return something of value that sustains the ones who sustain us. One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We can do it through gratitude, through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

47. “Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just by being, just by shimmering at the meadow’s edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

48. “What would it be like to be raised on gratitude, to speak to the natural world as a member of the democracy of species, to raise a pledge of interdependence? No declarations of political loyalty are required, just a response to a repeated question: “Can we agree to be grateful for all that is given?”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

49. “Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

50. “How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again?”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer