Origins Quotes

“You are one thing only. You are a Divine Being. An all-powerful Creator. You are a Deity in jeans and a t-shirt, and within you dwells the infinite wisdom of the ages and the sacred creative force of All that is, will be and ever was.”
― Anthon St. Maarten, Divine Living: The Essential Guide To Your True Destiny

“You can't hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree.”
― Malcolm X

“We do not have to be ashamed of what we are. As sentient beings we have wonderful backgrounds. These backgrounds may not be particularly enlightened or peaceful or intelligent. Nevertheless, we have soil good enough to cultivate; we can plant anything in it.”
― Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

“We are all creatures of the stars.”
― Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

“every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map. (p. 18)”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

“Deep within, there is something profoundly known, not consciously, but subconsciously. A quiet truth, that is not a version of something, but an original knowing. What this, absolute, truth [identity] is may be none of our business…but it is there, guiding us along the path of greater becoming; a true awareness. It is so self-sustaining that our recognition of it is not required. We are offspring’s of such a powerfully divine force – Creator of all things known and unknown.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence

“If we come from the water, I conclude that we come from different kinds of it. I will meet a person and in his eyes see an ocean, deep and never ending; then I will meet another person and feel as though I have stepped into a shallow puddle on the street, there is nothing in it. Or maybe some of us come from the water, and some of us come from somewhere else; then it's all a matter of finding those who are the same as us.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch, --as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? --from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“You know, I tried not to think of this place. I tried to let it go. To leave it behind. But it always came back to me, in my dreams. I'd dream about these details, these objects and people and places I'd left behind, and I'd wake up crying.”
― Danzy Senna

“Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.”
― Barnett Newman

“Wilderness gave us knowledge. Wilderness made us human. We came from here. Perhaps that is why so many of us feel a strong bond to this land called Serengeti; it is the land of our youth.”
― Boyd Norton, Serengeti: The Eternal Beginning

“A Swedish minister having assembled the chiefs of the Susquehanna Indians, made a sermon to them, acquainting them with the principal historical facts on which our religion is founded — such as the fall of our first parents by eating an apple, the coming of Christ to repair the mischief, his miracles and suffering, etc. When he had finished an Indian orator stood up to thank him.

‘What you have told us,’ says he, ‘is all very good. It is indeed bad to eat apples. It is better to make them all into cider. We are much obliged by your kindness in coming so far to tell us those things which you have heard from your mothers. In return, I will tell you some of those we have heard from ours.

‘In the beginning, our fathers had only the flesh of animals to subsist on, and if their hunting was unsuccessful they were starving. Two of our young hunters, having killed a deer, made a fire in the woods to boil some parts of it. When they were about to satisfy their hunger, they beheld a beautiful young woman descend from the clouds and seat herself on that hill which you see yonder among the Blue Mountains.

‘They said to each other, “It is a spirit that perhaps has smelt our broiling venison and wishes to eat of it; let us offer some to her.” They presented her with the tongue; she was pleased with the taste of it and said: “Your kindness shall be rewarded; come to this place after thirteen moons, and you will find something that will be of great benefit in nourishing you and your children to the latest generations.” They did so, and to their surprise found plants they had never seen before, but which from that ancient time have been constantly cultivated among us to our great advantage. Where her right hand had touched the ground they found maize; where her left had touched it they found kidney-beans; and where her backside had sat on it they found tobacco.’

The good missionary, disgusted with this idle tale, said: ‘What I delivered to you were sacred truths; but what you tell me is mere fable, fiction, and falsehood.’

The Indian, offended, replied: ‘My brother, it seems your friends have not done you justice in your education; they have not well instructed you in the rules of common civility. You saw that we, who understand and practise those rules, believed all your stories; why do you refuse to believe ours?”
― Benjamin Franklin, Remarks Concerning the Savages

“... the pursuit of origins is a way of rescuing territory from death and oblivion, a reconquest that ought to be patient, devoted, relentless and faithful.”
― Amin Maalouf, Orígenes

“The domestication (the culture) of man does not go deep--where it does go deep it at once becomes degeneration (type: the Christian). The 'savage' (or, in moral terms, the evil man) is a return to nature--and in a certain sense his recovery, his cure from 'culture'.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“How do we do this? Do I have to bite you?" I ask, squirming uncomfortably at the thought of doing so.

"Why, do you want to? If so, by all means go right ahead. I doubt I'd mind much," he laughs. "No, no biting. You watch too many movies.”
― Jessa L. Gilbert, Origins

“You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.”
― A. E. Van Vogt

“Does Yggdrasil drink from it because it is the Well of Wisdom, or is it the Well of Wisdom because Yggdrasil drinks from it?”
― J. Aleksandr Wootton, Her Unwelcome Inheritance

“The truth is that we never know from whom we originally get the ideas and beliefs that shape us, those that make a deep impression on us and which we adopt as a guide, those we retain without intending to and make our own.

From a great-grandparent, a grandparent, a parent, not necessarily ours? From a distant teacher we never knew and who taught the one we did know? From a mother, from a nursemaid who looked after her as a child? From the ex-husband of our beloved, from a ġe-bryd-guma we never met? From a few books we never read and from an age through which we never lived? Yes, it's incredible how much people say, how much they discuss and recount and write down, this is a wearisome world of ceaseless transmission, and thus we are born with the work already far advanced but condemned to the knowledge that nothing is ever entirely finished, and thus we carry-like a faint booming in our heads-the exhausting accumulated voices of the countless centuries, believing naively that some of those thoughts and stories are new, never before heard or read, but how could that be, when ever since they acquired the gift of speech people have never stopped endlessly telling stories and, sooner or later, everything is told, the interesting and the trivial, the private and the public, the intimate and the superfluous, what should remain hidden and what will one day inevitably be broadcast, sorrows and joys and resentments, certainties and conjectures, the imagined and the factual, persuasions and suspicions, grievances and flattery and plans for revenge, great feats and humiliations, what fills us with pride and what shames us utterly, what appeared to be a secret and what begged to remain so, the normal and the unconfessable and the horrific and the obvious, the substantial-falling in love-and the insignificant-falling in love. Without even giving it a second thought, we go and we tell.”
― Javier Marías, Poison, Shadow, and Farewell

“What this means is not a single Tower of Babel plotted in common, but hundreds of thousands of separate beginnings, the length and breadth of America. Energetic people who build against pains and uncertainties, as weaker ones merely hope against them.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time!”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“The Christian doctrine of creation is the origin of modern science.”
― M. B. Foster

“...a person comes from God and goes back to God, I think, for the body is conceived and born, it grows and declines, it dies and vanishes, but the spirit is a unity of body and soul, the way form and content are an invisible unity in a good picture...”
― Jon Fosse, I Is Another: Septology III-V

“The Absolute Anthropic Principle (AAP) states that the origin of everything (including but not limited to all life, the world and the universe) is Self not wanting to feel by itself and that the purpose of Self and as such the meaning of Life is Companionship more commonly known as Love.”
― Wald Wassermann

“While there might be a bit of genius in what we create, the real genius rests in whoever created the essential materials without which we could not create.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Meanwhile, at our present level of development, largely oblivious to our origins and our destination, we are half-asleep in frog pajamas.”
― Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

“When defining relatedness and family, there are many perspectives. To some, family is about shared genetics. To others, it’s about shared experiences: growing up together, celebrating holidays, going on vacation, visiting with relatives, and dealing with day-to-day life. To others, it’s a mix of both.”
― Rachel HS Ginocchio

“Posle vekova ropstva, četrdeset bombarovanja, ratova i čudovišnih političkih režima, podelâ koje nas i danas svrstavaju u „Nas” i „Njih”, nisam mogao da ne pomislim da nad Beogradom ne pada kiša, već samo suze, da mi ne znamo za prašinu, već samo za pepeo. Ko zna koliko puta sam poželeo da mi Beograd ne znači ništa, da mogu da pođem bilo gde, dalje od boli koju mi pričinjava što poreklo vučem odavde, a ne sa Jupitera, sa Neptuna. Ali, znao sam da bih bol pronašao bilo gde.”
― Boban Trifunović, Jaganjci

“Incredible as it may seem, however, this pinpoint historian, this Toynbee in reverse, has something of unusual interest (an "ace in the hole," as it were) to offer to the general reader. The Sumerologist, more than most other scholars and specialists, is in a position to satisfy man's universal quest for origins — for "firsts" in the history of civilization.”
― Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History

“I love how words travel through time; across space and time like little comets, their various meanings burning off like tails behind them.”
― Tess Kincaid, Pechewa: An American Odyssey

“Everything always seeks to return to its own source, it is a transcendent aspiration, whatever it is or in whatever context. Returning to the origin is always a condition of future vitality.”
― Geverson Ampolini