Animal Quote by David Abram

“...along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.” quote by David Abram — Download Open image

“...along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.”

David Abram

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Animal Character Clouds Creativity Dream Imagination Stones Stories Tree Unfolding World

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Does the human intellect, or "reason," really spring us free from our inherence in the depths of this wild proliferation of forms? Or on…

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“Human language, for us moderns, has swung in on itself, turning its back on the beings around us. Language is a human property, suitable only for communication with other persons. We talk to people; we do not speak to the ground underfoot. We've largely forgotten the incantatory and invocational use of speech as a way of bringing ourselves into deeper…

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Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then…

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Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winters, fog off-shore in the summers, salmon surging up the streams - all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell…

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What is magic? In the deepest sense, magic is an experience. It's the experience of finding oneself alive within a world that is itself…

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Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.

David Abram

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The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated events always happen somewhere. And for an oral culture, that location is never merely incidental to those occurrences. The events belong, as it were, to the place,…

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Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is…

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“Ecologically considered, it is not primarily our verbal statements that are "true" or "false," but rather the kind of relations that we sustain with the rest of nature. A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relation with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth. The ways of speaking common to that community—the…

David Abram

A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur…

David Abram

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If, on the other hand, we wish to describe a particular phenomenon without repressing our direct experience, then we cannot avoid speaking of the phenomenon as an active, animate entity with which we find ourselves engaged. To the sensing body, no thing presents itself as utterly passive or inert. Only by affirming the animateness of perceived things do we allow…

David Abram

We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

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Explore all 41 David Abram quotes

More Animal quotes

I was 3-years-old - to this day it is a vivid memory. My family and I were on a boat, catching fish. As one fish was caught, he was writhing, then he was thrown against the side of the boat. You couldn't disguise what it was. This was what we did to animals to eat them. The animal went from…

Joaquin Phoenix

Animals know nothing of themselves, and they also know nothing of the world.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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When grubbing for necessities man is still an animal. He becomes uniquely human when he reaches out for the superfluous and extravagant.

Eric Hoffer

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A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!

William Shakespeare

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“What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet…

Ernest Becker