Quotes by David Abram - Page 1

We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.
David Abram / Philosopher
Animism
Contact
Humans
Copy Quote
What we say has such a profound influence upon what we see, and hear, and taste of the world!
David Abram / Philosopher
Profound
Taste
World
Copy Quote
Sensory perception is the silken web that binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem.
David Abram / Philosopher
Ecosystems
Nervous
Perception
Copy Quote
We like to assume that language is a purely human property, our exclusive possession, and that everything else is basically mute.
David Abram / Philosopher
Assuming
Language
Mute
Copy Quote
Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.
David Abram / Philosopher
Animal
Body
Thinking
Copy Quote
The world we experience with our unaided senses is fluid and animate, shifting and transforming in response to our own shifts of position and of mood.
David Abram / Philosopher
Mood
Shifting
World
Copy Quote
Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils-all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness.
David Abram / Philosopher
Ears
Eye
Skins
Copy Quote
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 / Philosopher
Depth
Ongoing
Our Words
Copy Quote
Breathing involves a continual oscillation between exhaling and inhaling, offering ourselves to the world at one moment and drawing the world into ourselves at the next.
David Abram / Philosopher
Breathing
Drawing
Offering
Copy Quote
To describe the animate life of particular things is simply the most precise and parsimonious way to articulate the things as we spontaneously experience them, prior to all our conceptualizations and definitions.
David Abram / Philosopher
Experience
Definitions
Way
Copy Quote
...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 / Philosopher
Dream
Animal
Character
Copy Quote
We sleep, allowing gravity to hold us, allowing Earth - our larger body - to recalibrate our neurons, composting the keen encounters of our waking hours , stirring them back, as dreams, into the sleeping substance of our muscles.
David Abram / Philosopher
Dream
Sleep
Substance
Copy Quote
It was a though we’d been living for a year in a dense grove of old trees, a cluster of firs, each with its own rhythm and character, from whom our bodies had drawn not just shelter but perhaps even a kind of guidance as we grew into a family.
David Abram / Philosopher
Character
Tree
Years
Copy Quote
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 / Philosopher
Animal
Rivers
Talking
Copy Quote
There are so many unsung heroines and heroes at this broken moment in our collective story, so many courageous persons who, unbeknownst to themselves, are holding together the world by their resolute love or contagious joy. Although I do not know your names, I can feel you out there.
David Abram / Philosopher
Broken
Hero
Names
Copy Quote
Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air.
David Abram / Philosopher
Air
Voice
Wind
Copy Quote
Does the human intellect, or "reason," really spring us free from our inherence in the depths of this wild proliferation of forms? Or on the contrary, is the human intellect rooted in, and secretly borne by, our forgotten contact with the multiple nonhuman shapes that surround us on every hand?
David Abram / Philosopher
Animal
Hands
Spring
Copy Quote
Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.
David Abram / Philosopher
Ongoing
Perception
Taken
Copy Quote
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 alive. It is the experience of contact and communication between oneself and something that is profoundly different from oneself: a swallow, a frog, a spider weaving its web.
David Abram / Philosopher
Communication
Different
Magic
Copy Quote
Entranced by the denotative power of words to define, to order, to represent the things around us, weve overlooked the songful dimension of language so obvious to our oral [storytelling] ancestors. Weve lost our ear for the music of language -- for the rhythmic, melodic layer of speech by which earthly things overhear us.
David Abram / Philosopher
Ears
Order
Speech
Copy Quote
A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It is an active participant in those occurrences. Indeed, by virtue of its underlying and enveloping presence, the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there.
David Abram / Philosopher
Events
Land
May
Copy Quote
For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Apache, and the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia - as for numerous other indigenous peoples - the coherence of human language is inseparable from the coherence of the surrounding ecology, from the expressive vitality of the more-than-human terrain. It is the animate earth that speaks; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse.
David Abram / Philosopher
Australia
Expression
Vitality
Copy Quote
The animate earth - this moody terrain that we experience differently in anger and in joy, in grief and in love - is both the soil in which all our sciences are rooted and the rich humus into which their results ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons. Our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity
David Abram / Philosopher
Science
Dark
Grief
Copy Quote
No event for the Koyukon - or for most other indigenous peoples - is ever entirely meaningless or accidental, but neither is any event entirely predetermined or fated. Rather like the trickster, Raven, who first gave it its current form, the sensuous world is a spontaneous, playful and dangerous mystery in which we participate, an articulate and improvisational field of powers ever responsive to human actions and spoken words.
David Abram / Philosopher
Events
Ravens
World
Copy Quote
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 our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the world.
David Abram / Philosopher
Experience
Hands
Wish
Copy Quote
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, and to tell the story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the telling.
David Abram / Philosopher
Culture
Events
Singing
Copy Quote
In the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the palpable site, or matrix wherein meaning occurs and proliferates. In the absence of writing, we find ourselves situated in the field of discourse as we are embedded in the natural landscape; indeed, the two matrices are not separable. We can no more stabilize the language and render its meanings determinate than we can freeze all motion and metamorphosis within the land.
David Abram / Philosopher
Land
Two
Writing
Copy Quote
Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them for our attention; things expose themselves to the sun or retreat among the shadows, shouting with their loud colors or whispering with their seeds; rocks snag lichen spores from the air and shelter spiders under their flanks; clouds converse with the fathomless blue and metamorphose into one another; they spill rain upon the land, which gathers in rivulets and carves out canyons.
David Abram / Philosopher
Blue
Color
Rain
Copy Quote
There are those, however, that are not frightened of grief: dropping deep into the sorrow, they find therein a necessary elixir to the numbness. When they encounter one another, when they press their foreheads against the bark of a centuries-old tree...their eyes well with tears that fall easily to the ground. The soil needs this water. Grief is but a gate, and our tears a kind of key opening a place of wonder thats been locked away. Suddenly we notice a sustaining resonance between the drumming heart within our chest and the pulse rising from the ground
David Abram / Philosopher
Eye
Fall
Grief
Copy Quote
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 therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.
David Abram / Philosopher
Rain
Summer
Winter
Copy Quote

Related Philosopher Authors

Soren Kierkegaard
Philosopher
Wednesday, May 05, 1813
Sunday, Nov 11, 1855
Socrates
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Plato
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Zicheng Hong
Philosopher
Zhuangzi
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Zhang Zai
Philosopher
Zeno Of Elea
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Zengzi
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Zechariah Chafee
Philosopher
Monday, Dec 07, 1885
Friday, Feb 08, 1957
Yasuhiko Kimura
Philosopher
Yamaga Soko
Philosopher
Wednesday, Sep 21, 1622
Tuesday, Oct 23, 1685
Yajnavalkya
Philosopher
Xunzi
Philosopher
Xenophanes
Philosopher

Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Xenocrates
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970

View All Philosopher Quotes

Top Authors

Stephen Covey
Author
Monday, Oct 24, 1932
Monday, Jul 16, 2012
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Poet
Saturday, Aug 05, 1809
Thursday, Oct 06, 1892
Tyler, The Creator
Rapper
Wednesday, Mar 06, 1991
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poet
Wednesday, Oct 21, 1772
Friday, Jul 25, 1834
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essayist
Wednesday, May 25, 1803
Thursday, Apr 27, 1882
Francis Of Assisi
Saint
Thursday, Jun 24, 1182
Saturday, Oct 03, 1226
Charles Spurgeon
Preacher
Thursday, Jun 19, 1834
Sunday, Jan 31, 1892
Kanye West
Songwriter
Wednesday, Jun 08, 1977
Thursday, Jun 04, 2015
Muhammad Ali
Professional Boxer
Saturday, Jan 17, 1942
Friday, Jun 03, 2016
Chanakya
Teacher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Mother Teresa
Saint
Friday, Aug 26, 1910
Friday, Sep 05, 1997
Robert Frost
Poet
Thursday, Mar 26, 1874
Tuesday, Jan 29, 1963
Dolly Parton
Singer-Songwriter
Saturday, Jan 19, 1946
Isaac Newton
Physicist
Sunday, Jan 04, 1643
Monday, Mar 31, 1727
Dalai Lama
Saturday, Jul 06, 1935

View All Authors

David Abram Quotes - Page 1

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Philosopher Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Philosopher Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page