Top 200 Robin Wall Kimmerer Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Wealth among traditional people is measured by having enough to give away. Hoarding the gift, we become constipated with wealth, bloated with possessions, too heavy to join the dance.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

152. “Wild plants have changed to stand in well-behaved rows and wild humans have changed to settle alongside the fields and care for the plants – a kind of mutual taming.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

153. “Just as you can pick out the voice of a loved one in the tumult of a noisy room, or spot your child’s smile in a sea of faces, intimate connection allows recognition in an all-too-often anonymous world. This sense of connection arises from a special kind of discrimination, a search image that comes from a long time spent looking and listening. Intimacy gives us a different way of seeing, when visual acuity is not enough.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

154. “Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

155. “The marvel of a basket is in its transformation, its journey from wholeness as a living plant to fragmented strands and back to wholeness again as a basket. A basket knows the dual powers of destruction and creation that shape the world. Strands once separated are rewoven into a new whole. The journey of a basket is also the journey of a people.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

156. “If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment. When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not on going somewhere, but on being where you are. So I stretch out, close my eyes, and listen to the rain.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

157. “And, while expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

158. “It was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

159. “The edge of a leaf is not simply uneven; there is a glossary of specific words for the appearance of a leaf margin: dentate for large, coarse teeth, serrate for a sawblade edge, serrulate if the teeth are fine and even, ciliate for a fringe along the edge. A leaf folded by accordion pleats is plicate, complanate when flattened as if squashed between two pages of a book. Every nuance of moss architecture has a word.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

160. “Wewene, I say to myself: in a good time, in a good way. There are no shortcuts. It must unfold in the right way, when all the elements are present, mind and body harnessed in unison.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

161. “Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then they give it away.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

162. “Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

163. “A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn’t end until she creates a home where all of life’s beings can flourish. There are grandchildren to nurture, and frog children, nestlings, goslings, seedlings, and spores, and I still want to be a good mother.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

164. “A language teacher I know explained that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language. Maybe it also reflects our relationships with each other. Maybe a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world, other species a sovereign people, a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one – with moral responsibility to water and wolves, and with a legal system that recognizes the standing of other species. It’s all in the pronouns.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

165. “Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

166. “To plant trees is an act of faith.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

167. “I suppose that’s the way we humans are, thinking too much and listening too little. Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop. The drop swells on the tip of a cedar and I catch it on my tongue like a blessing.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

168. “I like to imagine that they were the first flowers I saw, over my mother’s shoulder, as the pink blanket slipped away from my face and their colors flooded my consciousness. I’ve heard that early experience can attune the brain to certain stimuli, so that they are processed with greater speed and certainty, so that they can be used again and again, so that we remember. Love at first sight.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

169. “It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a “species loneliness” – estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

170. “Imagine raising children in a culture in which gratitude is the first priority.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

171. “A harvest is made honorable when it sustains the giver as well as the taker.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

172. “Both were women with feet planted deep in the earth, who took pride in a back strong enough to carry a load for others.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

173. “Gardens are simultaneously a material and a spiritual undertaking. That’s hard for scientists, brainwashed by Cartesian dualism, to grasp.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

174. “When we call a place by name it is transformed from wilderness to homeland.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

175. “His teachings remind us that one half of the truth is that the earth endows us with great gifts, the other half is that the gift is not enough. The responsibility does not lie with the maples alone. The other half belongs to us; we participate in its transformation. It is our work, and our gratitude, that distills the sweetness.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

176. “They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I can only imagine the conversation between Eve and Skywoman: “Sister, you got the short end of the stick...”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

177. “A printmaker I know showed me that if you stare for a long time at a block of yellow and then shift your gaze to a white sheet of paper, you will see it, for a moment, as violet. This phenomenon – the colored afterimage – occurs because there is energetic reciprocity between purple and yellow pigments, which goldenrod and asters knew well before we did.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

178. “A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

179. “That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

180. “The Earth asks that we give our considerable gifts, in return for all we’ve been given and in return for all we have taken. We are called to a movement made of equal parts outrage and love.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

181. “On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

182. “Ceremonies large and small have the power to focus attention to a way of living awake in the world. The visible became invisible, merging with the soil. It may have been a secondhand ceremony, but even through my confusion I recognized that the earth drank it up as if it were right. The land knows you, even when you are lost.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

183. “The still air smelled of sweetgrass hanging from the rafters. What words can capture that smell? The fragrance of your mother’s newly washed hair as she holds you close, the melancholy smell of summer slipping into fall, the smell of memory that makes you close your eyes for a moment, and then a moment longer.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

184. “Imagine that while our neighbors were holding a giveaway, someone broke into their home to take whatever he wanted. We would be outraged at the moral trespass. So it should be for the earth. The earth gives away for free the power of wind and sun and water, but instead we break open the earth to take fossil fuels. Had we taken only that which is given to us, had we reciprocated the gift, we would not have to fear our own atmosphere today.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

185. “We are thankful to our Mother the Earth, for she gives us everything that we need for life. She supports our feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she still continues to care for us, just as she has from the beginning of time. To our Mother, we send thanksgiving, love, and respect. Now our minds are one.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

186. “All those nutrients field the growth of more new plants, in an accelerating cycle. This is the way for many ponds–the bottom gradually fills in until the pond becomes a marsh and maybe someday a meadow and then a forest. Ponds grow old, and though I will too, I like the ecological idea of aging as progressive enrichment, rather than progressive loss.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

187. “Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. That’s good medicine for land and people alike.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

188. “Leave this place better than you found it,” she admonished. And so we did. We also had to leave wood for the next person’s fire, with tinder and kindling.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

189. “It is not just changes in policies that we need, but also changes to the heart. Scarcity and plenty are as much qualities of the mind and spirit as they are of the economy. Gratitude plants the seed for abundance.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

190. “Their success is measured not by consumption and growth, but by graceful longevity and simplicity, by persistence while the world changed around them. It is changing now.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

191. “You don’t show your love and care by putting what you love behind a fence. You have to be involved.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

192. “Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

193. “The question of goldenrod and aster was of course just emblematic of what I really wanted to know. It was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together. And I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

194. “A fishnet catches fish, a bug net catches bugs. But a water net catches nothing, save what cannot be held. Mothering is like that, a net of living threads to lovingly encircle what it cannot possibly hold, what will eventually move through it.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

195. “All amphibians are tethered to the pond by their evolutionary history, the most primitive vertebrates to make the transition from the aquatic life of their ancestors to life on land.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

196. “But isn’t play the way we get limbered up for the work of the world?”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

197. “The world is more than your thoughtless commute.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

198. “Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and to dance for the renewal of the world. In return for the privilege of breath.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

199. “The roots may spread out like a map, but a map only helps if you know where you want to go.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

200. “We have enjoyed the feast generously laid out for us by Mother Earth, but now the plates are empty and the dining room is a mess. It’s time we started doing the dishes in Mother Earth’s kitchen. Doing dishes has gotten a bad rap, but everyone who migrates to the kitchen after a meal knows that that’s where the laughter happens, the good conversations, the friendships. Doing dishes, like doing restoration, forms friendships.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer