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Portrait of Joanna Macy

Joanna Macy

(1929–2025) Ecologist United States

44 quotes in 414 categories

Joanna Macy was an ecologist from the United States.

Quick Facts About Joanna Macy

Born: May 2, 1929
Died: July 19, 2025
Nationality: United States
Profession: Ecologist
Notable works: In praise of mortality: selections from Rilke's Duino elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus

About Joanna Macy

Mary Joanne Rogers Macy, known as Joanna Macy, was an American environmental activist, author and scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory and deep ecology. She was married to Francis Underhill Macy, the activist and Russian scholar who founded the Center for Safe Energy.

Biography source: Wikipedia

Quotes by Joanna Macy · Page 2

We are making choices that will affect whether beings thousands of generations from now will be able to be born sound of…

Able

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Compassion literally means to feel with, to suffer with. Everyone is capable of compassion, and yet everyone tends to avoid it because…

Avoidance

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The web of life both cradles us and calls us to weave it further.

Cradle

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The future is not out there in front of us, but inside us.

Fronts

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The refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life, flowers are…

Capacity

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Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all…

Alive

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If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love…

Climate change

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Confirming an intuitive sense I've always felt for the interconnectedness of all things, this doctrine has provided me ways to understand the…

Action

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“Cultural shifts happen on a different level; they come into view only when we step back enough to see a bigger picture…

Bigger picture

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Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the most beloved Buddhist teachers in the West, a rare combination of mystic,…

Activist

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In the early Buddhist view, then, a persons identity resides not in an enduring self but in his actions (karma)- that is…

Action

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Out of this darkness a new world can arise, not to be constructed by our minds so much as to emerge from…

Able

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“The heart tht breaks open can contain the whole universe.”

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We are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again - and participate in our world…

Beautiful

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The sorrow, grief, and rage you feel is a measure of your humanity and your evolutionary maturity. As your heart breaks open…

Anger

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Walk boldly through your life with an open, broken heart.

Broken

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It is good to realize that falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is as essential to evolutionary and…

Bad thing

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The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present, and when you're worrying about whether you're hopeful or hopeless or…

Capacity

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The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.

Break

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Joanna Macy by topic

World (17) Life (14) Time (9) Our world (9) Heart (9)