Top 200 Robin Wall Kimmerer Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “Linked by sweetgrass, there is reciprocity between you, linked by sweetgrass, the holder as vital as the braider.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

154. “I cherish a witch hazel kind of day, a scrap of color, a light in the window when winter is closing all around.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

155. “We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

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

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

157. “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

158. “The job is never over; it simply changes from one task to the next. What I’m looking for, I suppose, is balance, and that is a moving target. Balance is not a passive resting place – it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

159. “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

160. “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

161. “It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

162. “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

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

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

164. “For what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring? Science can give us knowing, but caring comes from someplace else.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

165. “I smile when I hear my colleagues say “I discovered X.” That’s kind of like Columbus claiming to have discovered America. It was here all along, it’s just that he didn’t know it. Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

166. “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.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

167. “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

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

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

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

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

173. “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.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

174. “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

175. “Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

176. “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

177. “In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

178. “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

179. “It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

180. “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

181. “Mosses are so little known by the general public that only a few have been given common names. Most are known solely by their scientific Latin names, a fact which discourages most people from attempting to identify them. But I like the scientific names, because they are as beautiful and intricate as the plants they name. Indulge yourself in the words, rhythmic and musical, rolling off your tongue: Dolicathecia striatella, Thuidium delicatulum, Barbula fallax.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

182. “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

183. “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

184. “How do we show our children our love? Each in our own way by a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

185. “People understood that when lives are given on their behalf they have received something precious. Ceremonies are a way to give something precious in return.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

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

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

190. “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

191. “The storytellers begin by calling upon those who came before who passed the stories down to us, for we are only messengers.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

192. “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

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

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

194. “One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven. And then they met – the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve – and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

195. “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

196. “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

197. “We are deluged by information regarding our destruction of the world and hear almost nothing about how to nurture it. It is no surprise then that environmentalism becomes synonymous with dire predictions and powerless feelings. Our natural inclination to do right by the world is stifled, breeding despair when it should be inspiring action.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

198. “The consumption-driven mind-set masquerades as “qualify of life” but eats us from within... But Governments still cling to the neoclassical fallacy that human consumption has no consequences.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

199. “The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

200. “Cautionary stories of the consequences of taking too much are ubiquitous in Native cultures, but it’s hard to recall a single one in English. Perhaps this helps to explain why we seem to be caught in a trap of overconsumption, which is as destructive to ourselves as to those we consume.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer