Animism Quotes

• Animists are people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always loved in relationship with others. Animism is lived out in various ways that are all about learning to act respectfully (carefully and constructively) toward and among other persons.

  Graham Harvey

  People, World, Way

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• As nonhuman animals, plants, and even 'inanimate' rivers once spoke to our oral ancestors, so the ostensibly “inert” letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless - as mysterious as a talking stone.

  David Abram

  Animal, Talking, Rivers

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• Animists are people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human.

  Graham Harvey

  People, World, Humans

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• Animism is not a belief system, but a worldview: The world is a sacred place and we are part of it. The factuality of this statement is not the issue. To say that the world is a sacred place is to make a statement about values, not facts. It’s a statement about what you mean by ‘sacred,’ just as ‘Money can’t buy happiness’ is a statement about what you mean by ‘happiness.’ To put it all very simply, animism isn’t a belief system, it’s a value system.

  Daniel Quinn

  Mean, Issues, World

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• There is no transcendent creator in animism, no god who set the clocks ticking and decides which ones to fix when they falter; nothing exists outside of nature. In other words, my philosophy does not require that I believe in something I cannot experience directly.

  Emma Restall Orr

  Philosophy, Believe, Doe

  Emma Restall Orr (2012). “The Wakeful World: Animism, Mind and the Self in Nature”, p.3, John Hunt Publishing

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

  David Abram

  Contact, Humans

  David Abram (1996). “The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World”, Pantheon

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• Our beliefs are rooted deep in our earth, no matter what you have done to it and how much of it you have paved over. And if you leave all that concrete unwatched for a year or two, our plants, the native Indian plants, will pierce that concrete and push up through it.

  John Fire Lame Deer

  Years, Two, Done

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• Animism characterizes tribes very low in the scale of humanity, and thence ascends, deeply modified in its transmission, but from first to last preserving an unbroken continuity, into the midst of high modern culture.

  Edward Burnett Tylor

  Humanity, Tribes, Culture

  Edward Burnett Tylor (2016). “Primitive Culture”, p.426, Courier Dover Publications

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• Increasing numbers of Pagans are identifying themselves as animists or naming their worldview as animism. Some Pagans use the term animism to refer to one strand within their Paganism, while others identify it as the most appropriate label for everything they do.

  Graham Harvey

  Numbers, Labels, Use

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• Only by affirming the animateness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the world.

  David Abram

  Depth, Our Words, Ongoing

  David Abram (2012). “The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World”, p.56, Vintage

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• Animism is a monist metaphysical stance, based upon the idea that mind and matter are not distinct and separate substances but an integrated reality, rooted in nature.

  Emma Restall Orr

  Reality, Ideas, Mind

  Emma Restall Orr (2012). “The Wakeful World: Animism, Mind and the Self in Nature”, p.78, John Hunt Publishing

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• Twentieth-century developments in science support a new animism. Developments in physics have led to a world of energetic events which seem to be self-moving and to behave in unpredictable ways. And recent studies in biology seem to demonstrate that bacteria and macromolecules have elemental forms of perception, memory, choice, and self-motion.

  David Ray Griffin

  Memories, Moving, Self

  David Ray Griffin (1989). “God and Religion in the Postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology”, p.88, SUNY Press

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• Animism is far from primitive, nor is it about pre-modernity because animism does not serve as a precursor to modernity. Rather animism is one of the many vitally present and contemporary other-than-modern ways of being human.

  Graham Harvey

  Doe, Way, Being Human

  Graham Harvey (2005). “Animism”, p.21, Columbia University Press

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• If it were possible to transfer the methods of physical or of biological science directly to the study of man, the transfer would long ago have been made ... We have failed not for lack of hypotheses which equate man with the rest of the universe, but for lack of a hypothesis (short of animism) which provides for the peculiar divergence of man ... Let me now state my belief that the peculiar factor in man which forbids our explaining his actions upon the ordinary plane of biology is a highly specialized and unstable biological complex, and that this factor is none other than language.

  Leonard Bloomfield

  Men, Long Ago, Peculiar

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• Animism is worth considering (a) because it exists, (b) because it addresses contemporary issues and debates, and (c) because it clarifies, in various ways, the argument that the project of modernity is ill-conceived and dangerously performed.

  Graham Harvey

  Issues, Addresses, Way

  Graham Harvey (2013). “Animism: Respecting the Living World”, p.12, Columbia University Press

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