Quote

If humans died in a healthy culture, they would not lock out the earth in metal coffins and carve their names on stone monuments, but would instead place the naked body in the earth and plant a tree above the silent heart.

William Irwin Thompson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Irwin Thompson
Age: 82 †
Born: 1938
Born: July 16
Died: 2020
Died: November 8
Critic
Historian
Mythographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Body
Died
Metal
Humans
Healthy
Locks
Heart
Instead
Metals
Would
Tree
Stone
Monuments
Names
Naked
Carve
Culture
Plant
Coffins
Place
Stones
Lock
Earth
Silent
Monument

More quotes by William Irwin Thompson

Image
The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
A World is not an ideology nor a scientific institution, nor is it even a system of ideologies rather, it is a structure of unconscious relations and symbiotic processes.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
It should be possible to say that there really is such as thing as genius and that what it is, is precisely a surprising and unexpected movement away from collective patterns of behavior and received wisdom.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
Science is the storytelling of our time.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
But the time has come the revelation has already occurred, and the guardian seers have seen the lightning strike the darkness we call reality. And now we sleep in the brief interval between the lightning and the thunder.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
One way to find food for thought is to use the fork in the road, the bifurcation that marks the place of emergence in which a new line of development begins to branch off.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
The planets are not hunks of stuff out there but nodes of vibration that resonate in multiple dimensions that enfold themselves into one another in patterns of complex recursiveness in which Sun, Moon, and Saturn are also modalities of Earth.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
Like a shadow that does not permit us to jump over it, but moves with us to maintain its proper distance, pollution is nature's answer to culture. When we have learned to recycle pollution into potent information, we will have passed over completely into the new cultural ecology.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order amidst their own chaos.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
I don't think anyone now really understands the planetisation of mankind, really understands the new world order emerging through all this period of strain and pain and contradiction, so more than ever, we need to have an internal sense of navigation.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
The teacher of history's work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
When we come to an edge we come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have been before.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
Not all intelligence can be artificial now, so if we make a mistake, the consequences are no longer simply located within an institution or a national culture.
William Irwin Thompson