Top 100 Stephen Harrod Buhner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Invasive plants – Earth’s way of insisting we notice her medicines.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

2. “Continually trying to look on the bright side interferes with our finding the wisdom that lies in the fruitful darkness. Continually striving upward toward the light means we never grow downward into our own feet, never become firmly rooted on the earth, never explore the darkness within and around us, a darkness without whose existence the light would have no meaning.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

3. “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. ALBERT EINSTEIN.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

4. “Consider Norbert Mayer’s poem Just now A rock took fright When it saw me It escaped By playing dead.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

5. “Things To Avoid Hops and beer. The potent estrogen, estradiol, found in large quantities in hops, plays a powerful role in increasing prostate size and is strongly implicated in both BPH and prostate cancer. Hopped beer should be avoided at all cost. Some studies have found that beer consumption is directly related to prostate inflammation. Other estrogenic plants such as licorice and black cohosh should be avoided as well.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

6. “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

7. “Licorice has highly negative effects on men’s androgen levels and hormonal functioning.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

8. “The majority of reductive scientists, when they experience this fundamental aspect of reality, experience one overriding emotion: fear. Self-organization leads to an inescapable conclusion: there is more going on than mechanical reductionism perceives or can explain.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

9. “Deep fasting puts the body into a state that is normally only experienced during sleep, one in which the liver and other detoxification systems can focus exclusively on detoxification, repair, and regeneration.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

10. “The medicine wheel represents the circle of all life. When you sit in the wheel and evoke the sacred, all life comes to sit in council. The human, only one member of the web of life, can use the ceremony of the wheel to restore contact with all the relations of life. The animal relations, plant relations, stone people, spirit relations, all things come to sit in council. Our connections with the world are thus restored and the healing of the Earth begins anew.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

11. “James Hillman so eloquently put it, “It was only when science convinced us that nature was dead that it could begin its autopsy in earnest.” A living, aware, and soul-filled world does not respond well to autopsy.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

12. “The tree does not end at it’s skin but exists also in the rain that falls downwind, many miles from the forest. In the seed exists the acorn, the oak, and the shade.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

13. “What you intend when you approach something in the world determines, to varying extents, the degree of sensory gating that occurs as you perceive that phenomenon. Intent, task demands, cognitive template, and gating defaults all affect what you sensorally perceive when a part of the exterior world and you meet. More colloquially, all of us see what we expect to see.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

14. “Gaia does not use top-down control over the parts that make up the whole. that approach is the least adaptable and least functional of all.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

15. “Symbiogenesis is the formation of more complex life-forms from the union of two dissimilar, simpler ones.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

16. “The self-organized bacterial membrane that is Gaia has constantly, over very long time lines, increased the complexity of its structure in order to stabilize itself and to more effectively deal with perturbations to the system.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

17. “In other words, what you believe – that is, the descriptions of the world around you that you received in childhood – act much like software; they program what is perceivable by your conscious mind.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

18. “Fifteen years ago I had an odd dream. In it, a medicinal plant that I was interested in, an Usnea lichen that is ubiquitous on trees throughout the world, told me that while it was good for healing human lungs it was primarily a medicine for the lungs of the planet, the trees. When I awoke, I was amazed. It had never occurred to me in quite that way that plants have some life and purpose outside their use to human beings.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

19. “Neuroimaging in the brain shows that once the areas of the brain that process incoming sensory data are sensitized to incoming data, that is, once the gating channels are opened more widely, the sections of the brain that gate that particular type of sensory data stay open. The baseline gating level increases even if the degree of sensory stimulus is not increased. The metaphysical background of the world begins to emerge into sensing on a regular basis.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

20. “We have lost, as James Hillman once put it, the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

21. “All the complex life-forms that we see were formed through symbiogenesis, a term coined by the person who first recognized its existence, Lynn Margulis.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

22. “The brain that we think of as a necessity for intelligence is only one possible form a neural network can take and that is determined by ecological function and species shape; it is not essential to intelligence. As neurologist Antonio Damasio puts it, “the mind is embodied, not just embrained.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

23. “It turns out that Clark’s Nutcrackers use a highly sophisticated form of triangulation to determine cache locations. When they make a cache they visually locate two landscape features in order to triangulate their cache.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

24. “Rightly did Darwin pin up a paper warning himself to be careful about using the words “higher” and “lower.” MARY MIDGLEY.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

25. “Golda looked back at me – those peaceful eyes! – and said in the most penetrating voice I had ever heard, ‘Because the Nazis taught me this: There is a Hitler inside each of us and if we do not heal the Hitler inside of ourselves, then the violence, it will never stop.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

26. “Rupert Sheldrake puts it, “The evangelists of science and technology have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the missionaries of Christianity.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

27. “To know how cherries and strawberries taste, ask children and birds. GOETHE.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

28. “One finding is important for understanding the nature of our sexuality as men. That is that male infants, in the womb, have regular erections – so do male infants after birth. Our sexuality is as much a part of us as breathing, our need for food, our need for love.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

29. “Those who have lost, as James Hillman put it, the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses, are sometimes so trained to believe that the objects outside them have no “feeling reality” to them that all feeling inflows of that sort are gated entirely.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

30. “The door to the soul is unlocked; you do not need to please the door keeper, the door in front of you is yours, intended for you, and the doorkeeper obeys when spoken to. ROBERT BLY.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

31. “When we use a measuring tape, we are using a system of numbers that is human invented. What are the birds using? And further, how are they storing it in memory? To be stored in memory the measurements have to be encoded in some form and that form has to have an internal consistency to it. In other words it has to possess the same kind of structural integrity as our system of mathematical measurement.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

32. “One of the most important things to remember in treating Gram-negative infections is that the use of a synergist will significantly increase the impact of the herbs on the bacteria.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

33. “And even though these words are moving into you through a visual medium – the printed words on this page – as you became immersed in this book, you no longer saw the words as a visual input. You’d left that surface orientation behind. You began, then, to work with, and experience, the meanings that these words are only the containers for.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

34. “Measured with magnetic field meters, the electromagnetic field that the heart produces is some 5,000 times more powerful than that created by the brain.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

35. “The use of cordyceps during radiation and chemo has been found to counteract the negative immune effects of those procedures.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

36. “The main herbs to treat MRSA are cryptolepis, sida, alchornea, bidens, black pepper, the berberines, usnea, juniper berry, isatis, licorice, ginger, ashwagandha, echinacea, red root, reishi, honey, and Artemisia annua.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

37. “Cordyceps has a lot of effects on airway epithelial cells. It acts to normalize cellular function in airway epithelia by normalizing ion transport.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

38. “In essence, when sensory gating channels are narrow, as they commonly are, we only perceive a very small part of the world around us. Only a tiny bit of the radiance of the world can shine in through the narrow aperture that is left; the rest of it is gated out.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

39. “Interestingly, the word, intelligence, comes from the Latin phrase inter legere – it means, simply, “to choose.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

40. “Because the Nazis taught me this: There is a Hitler inside each of us and if we do not heal the Hitler inside of ourselves, then the violence, it will never stop.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

41. “The world is made up of a series of nested self-organized systems within other nested self-organized systems within other self-organized systems. They, together, make up the much larger system we know as Earth, the living, self-organized biological organism that James Lovelock named Gaia. And all of them are intelligent.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

42. “Seven people with MRSA-infected wounds were treated with honey after antibiotics failed to eradicate the infection. All were successfully treated.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

43. “Every time a man ejaculates, he uses five milligrams of zinc. Zinc is highly concentrated in both sperm and seminal fluid, and frequent ejaculation can lead to zinc depletion, especially if the diet is poor.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

44. “In the human spirit, as in the universe, nothing is higher or lower; everything has equal rights to a common center which manifests its hidden existence precisely through this harmonic relationship between every part and itself. GOETHE.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

45. “Bacteria, as a group, are, in actuality, an extremely large self-organized system that covers the entire world.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

46. “Lewontin goes on to say, “The characteristic of a living object is that it reacts to external stimuli rather than being passively propelled by them. An organism’s life consists of constant mid-course corrections.”11.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

47. “It was only when science convinced us that nature was dead that it could begin its autopsy in earnest.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

48. “Curiously enough, many of the strongest antibacterial and antiviral plants are invasives.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

49. “You can use cordyceps or baikal skullcap or rhodiola infusions to stimulate the production of root tissues in plants – including the root brain – sida acuta infusions to fight bacterial infections, isatis infusions to fight viral infections, or even plants high in brassinosteroids to help a plant’s immune function.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

50. “The largest ecosystem known is the bacterial world that exists in the basalt layers two miles deep in the ocean, underneath and inside the basalt layers that exist another 100 to 500 feet beneath the water. This “seam” of bacterial life extends completely around the globe, a single unified ecosystem that is foundational to everything above it.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner