What is man without the beasts? For if all the beast were gone, man would die of a great loneliness of the spirit.
Chief SeattleRead
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the importance of environmental stewardship and the responsibility we bear for future generations.
Chief Seattle's quote reflects a profound understanding of humanity's relationship with nature, suggesting that our time on Earth is merely a loan from the future generations. It invites us to reconsider our actions and their long-term impacts, urging a collective responsibility towards preserving the environment for the sake of our children and those who will come after them.
Themes
EarthResponsibilityFutureEnvironmentStewardship
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about environmental protection, one could use this quote to emphasize our duty to future generations.
More from Chief Seattle
All quotes βLet him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only change of worlds.
Chief SeattleRead
All things are connected, like the blood that runs in your family "The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father." 1854 The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. You must give to the rivers the kindness you would give to any brother.
Chief SeattleRead
Revenge by young men is considered gain, even at the cost of their own lives, but old men who stay at home in times of war, and mothers who have sons to lose, know better.
Chief SeattleRead
The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of the pond, the smell of the wind itself cleansed by a midday rain, or scented with pinon pine. The air is precious to the red man, for all things are the same breath - the animals, the trees, the man.
Chief SeattleRead
The whites, too, shall pass - perhaps sooner than other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.
Chief SeattleRead
Similar quotes
My memories of Kabul are vastly different than the way it is when I go there now. My memories are of the final years before everything changed. When I grew up in Kabul, it couldn't be mistaken for Beirut or Tehran, as it was still in a country that's essentially religious and conservative, but it was suprisingly progressive and liberal.
Khaled HosseiniRead
I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.
Hannah ArendtRead
There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.
Victor HugoRead
As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
Simone WeilRead
I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.
Saul BellowRead
Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.
Virginia WoolfRead