Quotes About Animism

#1. Animism characterizes tribes very low in the scale of humanity, and thence ascends, deeply modified in its transmission, but from first to last preserving an unbroken continuity, into the midst of high modern culture.

Edward Burnett Tylor

#2. In the Land of Ire, the belief in fairies, gnomes, ogres and monsters is all but dead; in the Land of Ind, it still flourishes in all the vigour of animism.

Joseph Jacobs

#3. Animism is worth considering (a) because it exists, (b) because it addresses contemporary issues and debates, and (c) because it clarifies, in various ways, the argument that the project of modernity is ill-conceived and dangerously performed.

Graham Harvey

#4. It is a well known fact that even among highly cultured peoples the belief in animism prevails generally. Even the scholar may kick the chair against which he accidentally stumbles, and derive great satisfaction from thus 'getting even' with the perverse chair.

Holly Estil Cunningham

#5. A hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the laws.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#6. The animism paradigm has resurged in magic probably because of
a strong anarchist (or anti-authority) strain in modern magical thought. Animism offers a way to work with the spirit paradigm without issues of hierarchy intruding.

Patrick Dunn

#7. 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

#8. There is no transcendent creator in animism, no god who set the clocks ticking and decides which ones to fix when they falter; nothing exists outside of nature. In other words, my philosophy does not require that I believe in something I cannot experience directly.

Emma Restall Orr

#9. My affinity, as a novelist, with Dickens has been overstated. I relish the way everything in his prose pulsates with life force, and I'm in debt to him every time I invest inanimate objects with uncanny animism. But his female characters annoy me.

Michel Faber

#10. Animism is far from primitive, nor is it about pre-modernity because animism does not serve as a precursor to modernity. Rather animism is one of the many vitally present and contemporary other-than-modern ways of being human.

Graham Harvey

#11. Animism is a monist metaphysical stance, based upon the idea that mind and matter are not distinct and separate substances but an integrated reality, rooted in nature.

Emma Restall Orr

#12. Increasing numbers of Pagans are identifying themselves as animists or naming their worldview as animism. Some Pagans use the term animism to refer to one strand within their Paganism, while others identify it as the most appropriate label for everything they do.

Graham Harvey

#13. They sell the fact that you're susceptible to technical animism.

Daniel Suarez

#14. It was an odd friendship, but the oddnesses of friendships are a frequent guarantee of their lasting texture.

Ford Madox Ford

#15. Death can be more exciting than life.

George S. Patton

#16. All Things are in constant relationship, and shamanic journey is the choice to put one's self in direct contact and concert with that relationship.

S. Kelley Harrell

#17. I can't imagine falling in love with a devoutly religious person.

Susan Jacoby

#18. Recognizing the connection to All Things, even in creepy moments, keeps me true to my animistic perspective. Finding growth from them is my choice.

S. Kelley Harrell

#19. We are all but symbols of some greater thing - totems of ourselves
subject to change and growth. When we forget that metaphoric sense of ourselves, we lose sight of the overall path.

S. Kelley Harrell

#20. He'd grown unused to woods like this. He'd become accustomed to the Northwest, evergreen and shaded dark. Here he was surrounded by soft leaves, not needles; leaves that carried their deaths secretly inside them, that already heard the whispers of Autumn. Roots and branches that knew things.

Michael Montoure

#21. The reality is, it takes daily cultivation of a spiritual path, preferably with spiritual kin in proximity, to sustain not the feeling of elation, but the focused, mindful path of steady growth.

S. Kelley Harrell

#22. She had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy with leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap.

Mary Webb

#23. It is now generally admitted, at any rate by philosophers, that the existence of a being having the attributes which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot be demonstratively proved ... [A]ll utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical.

A.J. Ayer

#24. Children arrive animists. They learn about life, themselves, and empathy by imagining the liveliness of everything they come into contact with.

S. Kelley Harrell

#25. In the end, bless the darkness, hold the light, because the two aren't divisible.

S. Kelley Harrell

#26. The body is more than the temple of the soul. It's the grounded celebration of its rapture.

S. Kelley Harrell

#27. Modern materialists and religious extremists alike lack the spiritual animistic reverence for non-human beings that every culture once understood as a given.

Zeena Schreck

#28. If you look at people who have an iPhone or Android and are under 40 and are dissatisfied with their bank, it's actually quite a large market.

Sam Altman

#29. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

David Abram

#30. It seems true that the growth of science and secularism made organized Christianity feel under threat.

Mary Douglas

#31. We are the most open-feeling that we can be, when we can no longer be as we are.

S. Kelley Harrell