Indian Sage Quotes & Sayings

Every one is struggling for freedom-from the atom to the star. The ignorant man is satisfied if he can get freedom within a certain limit-if he can get rid of the bondage of hunger or of being thirsty. But that sage feels that there is a stronger bondage which has to be thrown off. He would not consider the freedom of the Red Indian as freedom at all. — Swami Vivekananda

During his four-day vision quest, the Indian built a sweat lodge of willow and hides, fasted, cleansed himself with sage and cedar, and endured the heat of the fire until his spirit was released to soar over a field of snakes. His ordeal ended when a vision of his mother appeared and told him to go back home because he had forgotten his pipe. — Wade Davis

Don't let form become more important than the substance of your heart and mind. Don't let commerce determine what you do exclusively. — Avery Brooks

Life is nothing more than a contradiction. — James Jean-Pierre

We can store patterns and conclusions in our heads, but we cannot store randomness itself. Randomness is a concept that defies categorization; by definition, it comes out of nowhere and can't be anticipated. While we intellectually accept that it exists, our brains can't completely grasp it, so it has less impact on our consciousness than things we can see, measure, — Anonymous

To the untutored sage, the concentration of population was the prolific mother of all evils, moral no less than physical. He argued that food is good, while surfeit kills; that love is good, but lust destroys; and not less dreaded than the pestilence following upon crowded and unsanitary dwellings was the loss of spiritual power inseparable from too close contact with one's fellow-men. — Charles Alexander Eastman

Oma says, when we were put on earth a really long time ago, each person came with a plant to heal all the troubles that come later ... We've got Indian balsam, sage, wild rose. We've got juniper berries and honeysuckle. All of them do something different inside, heal things. — J.J. Brown

But how shall an Occidental mind ever understand the Orient? Eight
years of study and travel have only made this, too, more evident that not
even a lifetime of devoted scholarship would suffice to initiate a Western
student into the subtle character and secret lore of the East. Every chap-
ter, every paragraph in this book will offend or amuse some patriotic or
esoteric soul: the orthodox Jew will need all his ancient patience to forgive
the pages on Yahveh; the metaphysical Hindu will mourn this superficial
scratching of Indian philosophy; and the Chinese or Japanese sage will
smile indulgently at these brief and inadequate selections from the wealth
of Far Eastern literature and thought. Some of the errors in the chapter on
Judea have been corrected by Professor Harry Wolf son of Harvard; — Will Durant

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles. — Albert Camus

In India, where there are no passports or identity discs, and where religions counts for so much- except among those few who have crossed the 'black water' - I believe that a man wearing a saffron robe, or carrying a beggar's bowl , or with silver crosses on his headgear and chest, could walk from Khyber Pass to Cape Comorin without once being questioned about his destination, or the object of his journey, — Jim Corbett

Who the hell are you?" "A friend of a friend." "Like who?" "Marianne, works at Charlie Char-Broil." "That silly bitch hasn't got any friends." Had I done any pleading or begging, she would have slammed the door. So I stood easy, mildly smiling. It's a relaxed area. There is a code for all the transients. If you are presentable, unhurried, vaguely indifferent, it is a challenge. I was having better luck with this than I expected, up to this point. I wanted it to continue. If you push against hostility and suspicion, you merely increase it. In a few moments I saw a little less animosity. — John D. MacDonald