Abram Quotes & Sayings

There are innumerable paths one may choose in this life- some that, at first, appear flawed. Yet, if lived with love and honesty, they will always render the greatest fruit. They will serve as a lesson to us all. - Abram — Jennifer DeLucy

For schizophrenia, the recovery rate with drug therapy is under 15%. With nutritional therapy, the recovery rate is 80%. — Abram Hoffer

And he blessed him and said: "Blessed [favored with blessings, made blissful, joyful] be Abram of God Most High, Possessor [and Maker] of heaven and earth" (Genesis 14:19). — John Crowder

A land without ruins is a land without memories - a land without memories is a land without history. — Abram Joseph Ryan

One's relation to one's house, in other words, is hardly a relation between a pure subject and a pure object - between an active intelligence, or mind, and a purely passive chunk of matter. — David Abram

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

For magicians -- whether modern entertainers or indigenous, tribal sorcerers -- have in common the fact that they work with the malleable texture of perception. — David Abram

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

I hold out my fist and knock on the glass. I watch Abram's brain process the sound, probably doesn't hear it very often unless he's got a late-night side-skank I'm unaware of, and he better not. — Jay Clark

4 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was 75 years old when he left Haran. 5 He — Anonymous

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

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

One of these days, she'll let me perform a favor for her without calculating what she owes me, which is always going to be nothing. Except for maybe a kiss, if our relationship ever reaches that level - pinnacle? - where favors can be repaid sexually (in a respectful manner). — Jay Clark

But if Abram bore his continual wanderings patiently, our fastidiousness is utterly inexcusable, when we murmur against God, if he does not grant us a quiet nest. — John Calvin

Almost every major turning point in the history of mankind was a side-effect of totally unrelated intentions. — Abram Gitspof

Therefore by the example of Abram, entire self-renunciation is enjoined, that we may live and die to God alone. — John Calvin

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

God wanted Abram to be his friend, and friends trust each other, and you can't learn to trust someone without a little risk and uncertainty and vulnerability. — John Ortberg

Sensory perception is the silken web that binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem. — David Abram

We like to assume that language is a purely human property, our exclusive possession, and that everything else is basically mute. — David Abram

I pretended not to be surprised when she showed up at my sliding door last night. Between the dog and me? I thought she was either a super-dedicated UPS guy or a polite serial killer. — Jay Clark

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

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

If you find that you're going through hell, keep moving. You will get to the end eventually. — Kimberly Brouillette

A Belief in Anything is a Belief in Nothing. — Cheryl Abram

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

Those who reinforce the disintegrating elements in our society will get no thanks from future generations. The family becomes the ultimate victim of homosexuality, a result which any society can tolerate only within certain limits.

If the American Psychiatric Association endorses one of the symptoms of social distress as a normal phenomenon it demonstrates to the public its ignorance of social dynamics, of the relation of personal maladaptation to social disharmony, and thereby acquires a responsibility for aggravating the already existing chaos.
[response to December 15, 1973 verdict] — Abram Kardiner

If the patient has been to more than four physicians, nutrition is probably the medical answer. — Abram Hoffer

is the mountain that lends its gregarious power to the multiple elements of this place. — David Abram

It must be time for my pill. I pull a tiny fourth from my jeans pocket.
Didn't you just take one?
Here. To help you get through class.
He swallows it without a word, tells me he wants to know what it feels like to take what I'm taking. It's the nicest, most disturbing thing anyone has ever said to me. — Jay Clark

We use generators," Abram explained. "For the basics, but we don't believe in progress for the sake of progress, nor do we hold with the idea of acquiring for the sake of showing ourselves better than our neighbors, which is often a byproduct of your modern conveniences. All of these things distance one from nature and a true relationship with our God. — Ruth Price

Dull people don't write interesting books. But they sure as hell can write them thick and fast. — Abram Gitspof

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

Some reckon their age by years, Some measure their life by art; But some tell their days by the flow of their tears And their lives by the moans of their hearts. — Abram Joseph Ryan

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

When God changed someone's name in Scripture, He changed their destiny: Abram to Abraham, Jacob to Israel, Simon to Peter. — Peter Kreeft

No matter the deviation, all things come full circle. You begin and end your journey in the same place, but with a different set of eyes. - Abram — Jennifer DeLucy

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

Now m the LORD said [1] to Abram, "Go from your country [2] and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. 2 n And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 o I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and p in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." [3] — Anonymous

We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. — David Abram

We have inherited new difficulties because we have inherited more privileges. — Abram L. Sachar

The politics of that year [2004] are old now, but the problem remains the same, the real culture clash of American life. It's between the essence of fundamentalism - paternalism, authority, and charity - and the messy imperatives of democracy, "the din of the vox populi" once derided by Abram Vereide. It's the difference between false unity, preached from above, and real solidarity, pledged between brothers and sisters - the kinds who are always bickering. — Jeff Sharlet

I like this documentary, starring her in captivity, better. — Jay Clark

A mathematician's reputation rests on the number of bad proofs he has given. — Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch

I only subpoena folks for jury duty that I know will be fair... — Paul Henry Abram

Pharmaceutical companies are very annoyed with niacin because their products have to compete with it. Some of their cholesterol-lowering drugs cost up to $150 a month while niacin costs about $10. — Abram Hoffer

We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things - of insects and wooden floors, of broken-down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents rising from the soil - seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what's worth knowing. — David Abram

It takes approximately forty years for innovative thought to be incorporated into mainstream thought. I expect and hope that orthomolecular medicine, within the next five to ten years, will cease to be a specialty in medicine and that all physicians will be using nurition as an essential tool in treating disease. — Abram Hoffer

It is the responsibility of good people to rise against bad rulers. — Abram Gitspof

18 So that day Jehovah made this covenant with Abram: "I have given this land to your descendants from the Wadi-el-Arish[*] to the Euphrates River. 19-21 And I give to them these nations: Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, Jebusites. — Anonymous

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

I tell patients that tranquilizers alone never cure anyone. They merely reduce the intensity of the symptoms and make life slightly more endurable. They create a better behaved, chronic dependent person. Only with orthomolecular treatment can the majority of schizophrenic patients hope to become well and normally independent. — Abram Hoffer

Is it the shadow itself that looks out through our eyes at midday? Small wonder that so many traditional peoples give themselves over to siesta, and sleep, for an hour or two at this time, letting their tissues and organs respond to this interior visitation by the night, allowing the many cells or souls within them to be tutored by the darkness that has taken temporary refuge within their flesh. — David Abram

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

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

For a brief moment the previous day, I'd felt a flicker of kinship with him because of my own barrenness, but he brandished his brokenness like a sword, ready to cut anyone who displeased him because someone in Pharaoh's household had once cut him. — Kristen Reed

Abram was very rich and yet very religious. — Matthew Henry

Like an airplane, an oven, or an elevator, Faebook is a tool that can make life's To-Dos fun and easy. — Carolyn Abram

As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished. As there are fewer and fewer songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and wetlands, human speech loses more and more of its evocative power. For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences. As the splashing speech of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we drive more and more of the land's wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.17 — David Abram

Do you think that Asian girl over there is pretty? I ask Abram, testing him, wondering if I'm really his type, or if I'm just his type until that rare breed of slutty Asian drops into his lap.
Only when she lets me cheat off of her, he answers. — Jay Clark

We sleep, allowing gravity to hold us, allowing Earth- our larger body- to recalibrate our neurons, composting the keen encounters of our waking hours (the tensions and terrors of our individual days), stirring them back, as dreams, into the sleeping substance of our muscles. We give ourselves over to the influence of the breathing earth. Sleep is the shadow of the earth as it seeps into our skin and spreads throughout our limbs, dissolving our individual will into the thousand and one selves that compose it- cells, tissues, and organs taking their prime directives now from gravity and the wind- as residual bits of sunlight, caught in the long tangle of nerves, wander the drifting landscape of our earth-borne bodies like deer moving across the forested valleys. — David Abram

Abram: .. One [Sentient] often believes it best to choose the higher path over the companionship of another. But, this circumstance draws to mind a point which Seers might forget to easily.
Lily: What's that?
Abram: That Love is the higher path — Jennifer DeLucy

Happiness is the compass of human soul. If we feel nothing, it means we are lost. — Abram Gitspof

18And t Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. (He was u priest of v God Most High.) 19And he blessed him and said, w Blessed be Abram by God Most High, x Possessor [2] of heaven and earth; 20 and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand! — Anonymous

We are too frightened of shadows. We cannot abide our vulnerability, our utter dependence upon a world that can eat us. Vast in its analytic and inventive power, modern humanity is crippled by a fear of its own animality, and of the animate earth that sustains us. — David Abram

And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto — Anonymous

The simple truth is ordinary, open and shared by all. — Cheryl Abram

What did "good government" really mean? Langlie and his brotherhood promised an end to political corruption. (There's no evidence that Langlie ever even took a drink, much less a bribe.) The days of "honest graft" were over, at least for a while. But seen from another perspective - that of ordinary citizens without access to Langlie and Abram's elite network - Langlie didn't so much end corruption as legalize it. Langlie wasn't opposed to a government organized around the interests of the greedy; he just didn't want to have to break the law to serve them. — Jeff Sharlet

The goal of a great democracy should be fulfillment, not ease. It should be adequacy, not serenity. — Abram L. Sachar

What we say has such a profound influence upon what we see, and hear, and taste of the world! — David Abram

it's natural that we associate language with such verbal intercourse. Unfortunately, this association has led many to assume that language is an exclusive attribute of our species - we, after all, are the only creatures that use words - and to conclude that all other organisms are entirely bereft of meaningful speech. It is an exceedingly self-serving assumption. Other animals, commonly possessed of senses far more acute than ours, may have much less need for a purely conventional set of signs to communicate with others of their species, or even to glean precise information from members of other species. — David Abram

Our surmises regarding the subtle functions of neural processes within the brain are profoundly constrained by the fact that the brain did not evolve in order to understand itself. The complex organization of the brain evolved as a consequence of our sensorial and muscled engagement with the landscapes that surround us. — David Abram

Abram, having failed in Genesis 13, comes through with flying colors in this battle of faith because he aligns himself with God, and he refuses to allow his heart to be compromised by the possibility of taking the riches that this world can offer. — Ligon Duncan

O father Abram, what these Christians are, Whose own hard dealing teaches them suspect The thoughts of others! — William Shakespeare

The secret of the true love of work is the hope of success in that work; not for the money reward, for the time spent, or for the skill exercised, but for the successful result in the accomplishment of the work itself. — Sidney Abram Weltmer

It's weird, you know, the way so many people accept the notion that stone is inanimate, that rock doesn't move. I mean, really, this here cliff moves me every time that I see it. — David Abram

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

When God promised Abram that he would make his name great, he was already known as Abram (exalted father) by many who were close to him. It follows then that the name Abram was not the "great" name God had promised to bestow upon him. But something very supernatural happened to the spiritual matrix of his name when he met Melchizedek in the Valley of Shaveh. — Francis Myles

Abram - Ibrahim, in the Arabic spelling - was the first to worship Allah, the one God, rather than the stars, the moon, or the sun. — Susan Wise Bauer

He [Abram] believes that the PRESENT is the only real thing and everything else is an illusion
a distraction — Jennifer DeLucy

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

Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies. — David Abram

A story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And 'making sense' must be here understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one's felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are. — David Abram

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

We cannot experience any entity in its totality, because we are not pure, disembodied minds, but are palpable bodies with our own opacities and limits. — David Abram

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

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

Society is constituted by the mental interaction of individuals and exists wherever two or three individuals have reciprocal conscious relations to each other. — Charles Abram Ellwood

Lily, look and see Narcissus's true reflection ... - Abram, Seers of Light — Jennifer DeLucy

I tried to close my ears to the strange worshipful chanting and fix my mind on God, but the Egyptians' idolatry weighed down my weary shoulders and brought tears to my closed eyes. — Kristen Reed

So the man told you the truth, and now you're surprised to discover he didn't lie. — Penny Reid

She told her father Mr. Abram Colhard that she did not like it at all being one being living then. He never said anything. She was afraid then, she was one needing charming stories and happy telling of them and not having that thing she was always trembling. — Gertrude Stein

He sure does fall asleep a lot. Must be the Paxil. he takes his pill and a half hour later it's like he's roofied himself. — Jay Clark

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

Before you shoot the messenger, it helps to get the message first. — Abram Gitspof

A fool holding his own in a debate is sure sign that the topic drifted into metaphysical waters. — Abram Gitspof

Do we weep for the heroes who died for us, Who living were true and tried for us, And dying sleep side by side for us; The martyr band That hallowed our land With the blood they shed in a tide for us? — Abram Joseph Ryan

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

I would far rather burn my whole book, than that he or any other man should think i behaved in a paltry manner (Charles Darwin) — Abram Kardiner

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