Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote advocates for selectively adopting useful ideas from various traditions while prioritizing personal experience and common sense.
Edward Abbey encourages us to draw wisdom and insights from a variety of spiritual and philosophical traditions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and others, while emphasizing the importance of our own senses and daily experiences. He suggests that we should be open to borrowing beneficial concepts but ultimately rely on our individual judgment and practical life experiences to navigate our beliefs and actions.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on spirituality and personal growth, one might quote Abbey to emphasize the benefits of eclectic learning.
More from Edward Abbey
All quotes →I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society.
If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.
The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.
I believe in nothing that I cannot touch, kiss, embrace.... The rest is only hearsay.
Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings.
Similar quotes
Darkness invades the dreams of the glassblower. Of all the unpleasantries his dreams grab in out of the night air, an extinguished light is the worst. Light in his dreams, was always hope: the basic, moral hope. As the contacts break helically away, hope turns to darkness, and the glassblower wakes sharply tonight crying, "Who? Who?"
What you hear depends on how you focus your ear. We're not talking about inventing a new language, but rather inventing new perceptions of existing languages.
Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.
Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don't see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.
Londoners say, 'We're so proud of our diversity and tolerance,' but what if that diversity ends up making us intolerant?
Every day, we at the United Nations see the human toll of an absence of regulations or lax controls on the arms trade. We see it in the suffering of civilian populations trapped by armed conflict or pervasive crime. We see it in the killing and wounding of civilians - including children, the most vulnerable of all.