Daniel Quinn Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

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
The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was BORN to do.

Daniel Quinn
And every time the Takers stamp out a Leaver culture, a wisdom ultimately tested since the birth of mankind disappears from the world beyond recall.

Daniel Quinn
I didn't want a guru or a kung fu master or a spiritual director. I didn't want to become a sorcerer or learn the zen of archery or meditate or align my chakras or uncover mast incarnations...I was after something else entirely, but it wasn't in the Yellow Pages or anywhere else that I could discover.

Daniel Quinn
If you alone found out what the lie was, then you're probably right—it would make no great difference. But if you ALL found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference indeed.

Daniel Quinn
The price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.

Daniel Quinn
You shouldn't have to settle for rabbits if what you want is deer

Daniel Quinn
In effect, you're saying that if you knew how you oughtt to live, then the flaw is man could be controlled. If you knew how you ought to live, you wouldn't be forever screwing up the world. perhaps in fact the two things are actually one thing. Perhaps the flaw in man is exactly this: that he doesn't know how he ought to live.

Daniel Quinn
If you can't discover what's keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual - "Ishmael

Daniel Quinn
Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you'll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you'll be tempted to say to the people around you, how can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?

Daniel Quinn
We're not destroying the world because we're clumsy. We're destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.

Daniel Quinn
I have amazing news for you. Man is not alone on this planet. He is part of a community, upon which he depends absolutely.

Daniel Quinn
There are times when having too much to say can be as dumbfounding as having too little.

Daniel Quinn
But why? Why do you need prophets to tell you how you ought to live? Why do you need anyone to tell you how you ought to live

Daniel Quinn
Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable—and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.

Daniel Quinn
In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library.

Daniel Quinn
Yes, I'm afraid you're right. Trial and error isn't a bad way to learn how to build an aircraft, but it can be a disastrous way to learn how to build a civilization.

Daniel Quinn