Brian Swimme Quotes

#1. Each being in the universe yearns for the free energy necessary for survival and development. Each existence resists extinction. The consequent history of violence in the universe is as inevitable as the gravitational pull between the Earth and the Sun.

Brian Swimme

#2. Our ancestry streches back through the life forms and into the stars, back into the beginnings of the primeval fireball. This universe is a single multiform energetic unfolding of matter, mind, intelligence and life.

Brian Swimme

#3. All professions, all work, all activity in the human world finds its essential meaning in the context of a people's cosmic story.

Brian Swimme

#4. A tree is a self: it is 'unseen shaping' more than it is leaves or bark, roots or cellulose or fruit ... What this means is that we must address trees as we must address all things, confronting them in the awareness that we are in the presence of numinous mystery.

Brian Swimme

#5. Embrace your death ... Cherish your awareness of death as a gift from the universe.

Brian Swimme

#6. The proper condition of the human is not bovine placidity ... the highest degree of tension that can be creatively borne.

Brian Swimme

#7. I flush with heaving passion's strange delight, Yet find contentment lost in appetite.

Brian Swimme

#8. The earth was once molten rock and now sings operas.

Brian Swimme

#9. The universe shivers with wonder in the depths of the human,

Brian Swimme

#10. If you let hydrogen gas alone for 13 billion years it will become giraffes, rose bushes and humans.

Brian Swimme

#11. When humans find themselves surrounded by nothing but objects, the response is always one of loneliness.

Brian Swimme

#12. Humans enter this world and awaken to a simple truth: We must find our story with this great epic of being.

Brian Swimme

#13. Four billion years ago the planet Earth was molten rock; now it sings opera!

Brian Swimme

#14. That is our larger destiny: to allow the Earth to organize in a new way, in a manner impossible all the billions of years prior to humanity

Brian Swimme

#15. The universe is an inexhaustible celebration of ultimate mystery!

Brian Swimme

#16. This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes, and humans.

Brian Swimme

#17. The new cosmic story emerging into human awareness overwhelms all previous conceptions of the universe for the simple reason that it draws them all into its comprehensive fullness. Who can learn what this means and remain calm?

Brian Swimme