Wade Davis Quotes

#1. So be patient. Do not compromise. And give your destiny time to find you.

Wade Davis

#2. These other cultures are not failed attempts to be us; they are unique manifestations of the spirit - other options, other visions of life itself.

Wade Davis

#3. She had a hundred precocious ideas, and some were good and true, but they could never be hers until she found them alone, for ideas are but words unless they are sown in experience.

Wade Davis

#4. The surface of the Earth itself is an immense loom upon which the sun weaves the fabric of existence.

Wade Davis

#5. Schultes was a naive photographer. For him a beautiful image was one of something beautiful.

Wade Davis

#6. We settled long ago," he later reflected, "that there's no reckoning with death.

Wade Davis

#7. What is science but the pursuit of the truth? What is Buddhism but 2500 years of observation as to the nature of mind?

Wade Davis

#8. In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.

Wade Davis

#9. Change is no threat to culture.

Wade Davis

#10. It was more than love at first sight. For Mallory it was as if a dam had burst and the impounded emotions of a young lifetime had found immediate release.

Wade Davis

#11. It's haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction.

Wade Davis

#12. The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.

Wade Davis

#13. A young Harvard student, traveled west to Oklahoma to live among the Kiowa and participate in the solemn rites of the peyote cult. In one photograph the land appears as a blur of dust, the sky fading to gray, the air darkened by soil worked loose by the wind, the farmhouses

Wade Davis

#14. On paper I would be a rather bold individual in our culture.

Wade Davis

#15. There is no doubt that we are a very cruel people,' Winston Churchill wrote home from the front. 'Severity always,' went the British motto, 'justice when possible.

Wade Davis

#16. The healing repertoire of the Egyptians included herbal remedies for crocodile bites.

Wade Davis

#17. You know, once something freezes, it's solid. That's the key to the arctic - they didn't fear the cold, they made use of it.

Wade Davis

#18. To have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with Baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity.

Wade Davis

#19. Actual places, landscapes that exist[ed] simultaneously in both physical and metaphysical space ... true geographical refugia, verdant valleys dominated by protective mountain deities where people could seek solace as lonely pilgrims, or flee violence as a community in time of war.

Wade Davis

#20. What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.

Wade Davis

#21. Risk discomfort and solitude for understanding.

Wade Davis

#22. Social mores, he argued, rules of protocol, concepts of rectitude and honor had no objective basis. They were only reflections of public and private fears.

Wade Davis

#23. The measure of a society is not only what it does but the quality of its aspirations.

Wade Davis

#24. Genocide, the physical extinction of a people, is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people's way of life, is not only not condemned, it's universally celebrated as part of a development strategy.

Wade Davis

#25. Marsh had travelled on foot to the source of the Nile and once stood down a charging rhinoceros by intrepidly opening a pink umbrella in its face.

Wade Davis

#26. Death's power lies in fear, which flourishes in the imagination and the unknown.

Wade Davis

#27. Only, in Haiti, I realized, is it possible to drink rum and haggle with a god.

Wade Davis

#28. All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities for life. Change is the one constant in human history.

Wade Davis

#29. Heroes are never perfect, but they're brave, they're authentic, they're courageous, determined, discreet, and they've got grit.

Wade Davis

#30. In my humble opinion," (Ghandi) told the court, "non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is co-operation with good.

Wade Davis

#31. Language is an old-growth forest of the mind.

Wade Davis

#32. Even now I am haunted by the touching look of the young, bright, anxious eyes as we passed along the rows of sufferers. There, all around us, lying maimed and battered and dying, was the flower of Britain's youth.

Wade Davis

#33. I want to lose all harshness of jagged nerves, to be above all gentle. I feel we have achieved victory for that almost more than anything-to be able to cultivate gentleness.
George Malory to his wife Ruth at the end of the Great War

Wade Davis

#34. The world can only appear monochromatic to those who persist in interpreting what they experience through the lens of a single cultural paradigm, their own. For those with the eyes to see and the heart to feel, it remains a rich and complex topography of the spirit.

Wade Davis