Top 250 Robin Wall Kimmerer Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “If you didn’t know better, you might not recognize raindrops and rivers as kin, so different are the particular and the collective.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

202. “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

203. “We have constructed an artifice, a Potemkin village of an ecosystem where we perpetrate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa’s sleigh, not been ripped from the earth. The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

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

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

205. “On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

206. “Cresting the ridge releases me into an explosion of light and space and wind.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

207. “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

208. “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

209. “To me, an experiment is a kind of conversation with plants: I have a question for them, but since we don’t speak the same language, I can’t ask them directly and they won’t answer verbally. But plants can be eloquent in their physical responses and behaviors. Plants answer questions by the way they live, by their responses to change; you just need to learn how to ask.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

210. “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

211. “Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

212. “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

213. “Most spores can’t germinate in the leafy carpet of their own parents.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

214. “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 relationships.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

215. “But I think I cannot own a thing and love it at the same time. Owning diminishes the innate sovereignty of a thing, enriching the possessor and reducing the possessed. – Barbara Kingsolver writes, ‘It’s going to take the most selfless kind of love to do right by what we cherish and give it the protection to flourish outside our possessive embrace’.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

216. “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

217. “The gifts of the earth are to be shared, but gifts are not limitless. The generosity of the earth is not an invitation to take it all. Every bowl has a bottom. When it’s empty, it’s empty.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

218. “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

219. “That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage. The fields made a gift of berries to us and we made a gift of them to our father. The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes. This is hard to grasp for societies steeped in notions of private property, where others are, by definition, excluded from sharing.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

220. “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

221. “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

222. “Biologists may make unsuitable dinner conversation, but we are seldom bored.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

223. “Their dad had just pulled up stakes, left the country – and us. He said that he no longer wanted a life with so much responsibility, so the responsibility was all mine.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

224. “We’ve allowed the “market” to define what we value so that the redefined common good seems to depend on profligate lifestyles that enrich the sellers while impoverishing the soul and the earth.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

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

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

226. “As it grew closer, they could see that it was a woman arms outstretched, long black hair billowing behind as she spiralled toward them.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

227. “When botanists go walking the forests and fields looking for plants, we say we are going on a foray. When writers do the same, we should call it a metaphoray, and the land is rich in both. We need them both; scientist and poet Jeffrey Burton Russell writes that “as the sign of a deeper truth, metaphor was close to sacrament. Because the vastness and richness cannot be expressed by the overt sense of a statement alone.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

228. “You can tell they are sisters: one twines easily around the other in relaxed embrace while the sweet baby sister lolls at their feet, close, but not too close.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

229. “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

230. “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

231. “The student told me that, when she came to the United States, the greatest culture shock she experienced was not language or food or technology, but waste.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

232. “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

233. “I’m told that the Chinese character for catastrophe is the same as that which represents opportunity.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

234. “Ignorance makes it too easy to jump to conclusions.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

235. “The next stage of human economy will parallel what we are beginning to understand about nature. It will call forth the gifts of each of us; it will emphasize cooperation over competition; it will encourage circulation over hoarding; and it will be cyclical, not linear. Money may not disappear anytime soon, but it will serve a diminished role even as it takes on more of the properties of the gift. The economy will shrink, and our lives will grow.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

236. “I’ve long believed that the ones who have more joy win.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

237. “I think you cannot own a thing and love it at the same time.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

238. “What if our metrics for well-being included birdsong, the crescendo of Crickets on a summer evening, and neighbors calling to each other across the road?”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

239. “Creation stories offer a glimpse into the worldview of a people, of how they understand themselves, their place in the world, and the ideals to which they aspire. Likewise, the collective fears and deepest values of a people are also seen in the visage of the monsters they create.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

240. “Instead of changing the land to suit their convenience, they changed themselves. Eating with the seasons is a way of honoring abundance, by going to meet it when and where it arrives.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

241. “Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

242. “In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

243. “When an economic system actively destroys what we love, isn’t it time for a different system?”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

244. “This is the electricity of photosynthesis, turning sun into sugar, spinning straw into gold.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

245. “The prosperity of the community grows from the flow of relationships, not the accumulation of goods. When the natural world is understood as a gift instead of private property, there are ethical constraints on the accumulation of abundance that is not yours to own. Gifts are not meant to be hoarded, and thus made scarce for others, but given away, which generates sufficiency for all.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

246. “The practice of observing the living world and taking inspirations for human ways of living from its model is an essential element of indigenous science. It embraces the reality that there are intelligences other than our own, from whom we might learn.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

247. “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

248. “It’s life, and ours, exist only because of a myriad of synchronicities that bring us to this particular place at this particular moment. In return for such a gift, the only sane response is to glitter in reply.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

249. “If there’s not enough of what you want, then want something else.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

250. “Many of our ancient teachings counsel that whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer