Barry Lopez Quotes

Quotes about:

• To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.

  Barry Lopez

  Nature, Hands, Rivers

  69 Copy quote

• We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone's calling, to lead a life that helps.

  Barry Lopez

  Calling, World, Helping

  48 Copy quote

• When we enter the landscape to learn something, we are obligated, I think, to pay attention rather than constantly to pose questions. To approach the land as we would a person, by opening an intelligent conversation. And to stay in one place, to make of that one, long observation a fully dilated experience. We will always be rewarded if we give the land credit for more than we imagine, and if we imagine it as being more complex even than language. In these ways we begin, I think, to find a home, to sense how to fit a place.

  Barry Lopez

  Nature, Home, Intelligent

  FaceBook post by Barry Lopez from Sep 21, 2016

  58 Copy quote

• The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard...be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there.

  Barry Lopez

  Attitude, Simple, Land

  37 Copy quote

• If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.

  Barry Lopez

  Giving, Stories, Alive

  FaceBook post by Barry Lopez from Dec 25, 2012

  52 Copy quote

• The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of the exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by the land as it is by genes.

  Barry Lopez

  Character, Land, Mind

  43 Copy quote

• Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.

  Barry Lopez

  Loneliness, Exercise, Night

  FaceBook post by Barry Lopez from Jul 30, 2014

  49 Copy quote

• Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

  Barry Lopez

  Love, Heart, Compassion

  FaceBook post by Barry Lopez from Oct 30, 2011

  40 Copy quote

• The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.

  Barry Lopez

  Love, Intelligent, Reason

  8 Copy quote

• One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no definitive answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

  Barry Lopez

  Light, Expression, Excellence

  "In 'Sliver Of Sky,' Barry Lopez Confronts Childhood Sexual Abuse". 'Fresh Air' with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. January 10, 2013.

  31 Copy quote

• To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, 'There could be more...things we don't understand,' is not to damn knowledge....It is to permit yourself an extraordinary, freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you might be right...This tolerance for mystery invigorates the imagination; and it is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.

  Barry Lopez

  Order, Giving, Imagination

  34 Copy quote

• The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.

  Barry Lopez

  Mean, Land, Way

  Barry Lopez (2013). “Arctic Dreams”, p.526, Open Road Media

  29 Copy quote

• The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.

  Barry Lopez

  Land, Understanding, Urges

  7 Copy quote

• I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.

  Barry Lopez

  Inspirational, Heart, Soul

  25 Copy quote

• Remember on this one thing, said Badger. The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memories. This is how people care for themselves.

  Barry Lopez

  Memories, People, Giving

  FaceBook post by Barry Lopez from Jun 30, 2010

  41 Copy quote

• The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.

  Barry Lopez

  Land, Consideration, Human Life

  Barry Lopez (2013). “Arctic Dreams”, p.356, Open Road Media

  54 Copy quote

• real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.

  Barry Lopez

  Real, Moving, Darkness

  29 Copy quote

• The cold view to take of our future is that we are therefore headed for extinction in a universe of impersonal chemical, physical, and biological laws. A more productive, certainly more engaging view, is that we have the intelligence to grasp what is happening, the composure not to be intimidated by its complexity, and the courage to take steps that may bear no fruit in our lifetimes.

  Barry Lopez

  Views, Law, May

  FaceBook post by Barry Lopez from Feb 24, 2016

  7 Copy quote

• The opposite of love is not hate; it's indifference. To be indifferent is to not express love.

  Barry Lopez

  Hate, Love Is, Opposites

  7 Copy quote

• One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret.

  Barry Lopez

  Dream, Nature, Regret

  FaceBook post by Barry Lopez from Dec 18, 2011

  22 Copy quote

• No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself.

  Barry Lopez

  Blood, Darkness, Mind

  Barry Lopez (2013). “Arctic Dreams”, p.529, Open Road Media

  35 Copy quote

• We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.

  Barry Lopez

  Universe

  FaceBook post by Barry Lopez from Mar 14, 2011

  26 Copy quote

• We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.

  Barry Lopez

  Land, Community, Needs

  8 Copy quote

• Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

  Barry Lopez

  Technology, Rivers, Political

  Barry Lopez (2013). “Arctic Dreams”, p.65, Open Road Media

  22 Copy quote

• If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.

  Barry Lopez

  Inspirational Life, Responsibility, Adults

  Barry Lopez (2013). “Arctic Dreams”, p.529, Open Road Media

  14 Copy quote

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