Daniel Quinn Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

You've been in love with someone for a decade - someone who barely knows you're alive. You've done everything, tried everything to make this person see that you're a valuable, estimable person, and that your love is worth something. Then one day you open the paper and glance at the Personals column, and there you see that your loved one has placed an ad... seeking someone worthwhile to love and be loved by.

Daniel Quinn
Don't try to drive the homeless into places we find suitable. Help them survive in places they find suitable.

Daniel Quinn
Increasing food production to feed an increased population results in yet another increase in population.

Daniel Quinn
We've poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit.. and we go on gobbling them up. It's hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody's really doing anything about it. It's a problem our children will have to solve, or their children.

Daniel Quinn
We're straying from the path of salvation because we remember that we once belonged to the world and were content in that belonging.

Daniel Quinn
Everyone in your culture knows this. Man was born to turn the world into paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidty, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness.

Daniel Quinn
A castaway in the sea was going down for the third time when he caught sight of a passing ship. Gathering his last strength, he waved frantically and called for help. Someone on board peered at him scornfully and shouted back, "Get a boat!

Daniel Quinn
Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you.

Daniel Quinn
That evening I went for a walk. To walk for the sake of walking is something I seldom do. Inside my apartment I'd felt inexplicably anxious. I needed to talk to someone. to be reassured or perhaps I needed to confess my sin: I was once again having impure thoughts about saving the world. Or it was neither of these - I was afraid I was dreaming.

Daniel Quinn
Man's destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he's done.. almost. He hasn't quite made it, and it looks as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man's conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world.. or to repair the devastation we've already wrought.

Daniel Quinn
You know how to split atoms, how to send explorers to the moon, how to splice genes, but you don't know how people ought to live.

Daniel Quinn
Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere in the universe that creation came to an end with the birth of man? Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere out there that man was the climax toward which creation had been straining from the beginning?...Very far from it. The universe went on as before, the planet went on as before. Man's appearance caused no more stir than the appearance of jellyfish.

Daniel Quinn
No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.

Daniel Quinn
Karl Marx recognized that workers without a choice are workers in chains. But his idea of breaking chains was for us to depose the pharaohs and then build the pyramids for ourselves, as if building pyramids is something we just can't stop doing, we love it so much.

Daniel Quinn
If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.

Daniel Quinn
What's normal is for things to work. What's not normal is for things to fail.

Daniel Quinn
Within your culture as a whole, there is in fact no significant thrust toward global population control. The point to see is that there never will be such a thrust so long as you're enacting a story that says the gods made the world for man. For as long as you enact that story, Mother Culture will demand increased food production today- and promise population control tomorrow.

Daniel Quinn
Lies are like sleeping pills. You should only use them when you absolutely have to. They spoil everything if you make a habit of them.

Daniel Quinn
No story is devoid of meaning... If you know how to look for it.

Daniel Quinn
We need schools to force kids to learn things they have no use for.

Daniel Quinn
Remember that your tracks are one strand of the web woven endlessly in the hand of god. They're tied to those of the mouse in the field, the eagle on the mountain, the crab in its hold, the lizard beneath its rock. The leaf that falls to the ground a thousand miles away touches your life. The impress of your foot in the soil is felt through a thousand generations.

Daniel Quinn
All paths lie together in the hand of god like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle's or the squirrel's or the sparrow's. All are held together.

Daniel Quinn
If the world is saved, it will not be by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all. Why not new minds with new programs? Because where you find people working on programs, you don't find new minds, you find old ones. Programs and old minds go together like buggy whips and buggies.

Daniel Quinn
The world must live. We are only one species among billions. The gods don't love us any more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies.

Daniel Quinn
There are indeed times when one should TRUST blindly, just as there are times when one should not. WISDOM consists in being able to tell one from the other.

Daniel Quinn
He began to speak to me, not in the jocular way of visitors to the menagerie but rather as one speaks to the wind or to the waves crashing on a beach, uttering that which must be said but which must not be heard by anyone.

Daniel Quinn
The journey itself is going to change you, so you don't have to worry about memorizing the route we took to accomplish that change.

Daniel Quinn
You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.

Daniel Quinn
The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.

Daniel Quinn
People will listen when they're ready to listen and not before. Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new.

Daniel Quinn