Quotes

“We need a real awakening, a real enlightenment. New laws and policies are not enough.  We need to change our way of thinking and seeing things. This is possible; the truth is that we have not really tried to do it yet. Each one of us has to do it for ourselves.  No one else can do it for you.  If you are an activist and you’re eager to do something, you should begin with yourself and your own mind.

“It’s my conviction that we cannot change the world if we’re not able to change our way of thinking, our consciousness. Collective change in our way of thinking and seeing things is crucial. Without it, we cannot expect the world to change. Collective awakening is made of individual awakening. You must wake yourself up first, and then those around you have
a chance. When we ourselves suffer less we can be more helpful, and we can help others to change themselves too. Peace, awakening, and enlightenment always begin with you. You are the one you need to count on.”

Thich Nhat Han,
Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet

“I am quite confident that even as the oceans boil, and the hurricanes beat violently against our once safe shores, and the air sweats with the heat of impending doom, and our fists protest the denial of climate justice, that there is a path to take that has nothing to do with victory or defeat: a place we do not yet know the coordinates to; a question we do not yet know how to ask. The point of the departed arrow is not merely to pierce the bullseye and carry the trophy: the point of the arrow is to sing the wind and remake the world in the brevity of flight. There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice. 
”May this new decade be remembered as the decade of the strange path, of the third way, of the broken binary, of the traversal disruption, the kairotic moment, the posthuman movement for emancipation, the gift of disorientation that opened up new places of power, and of slow limbs. May this decade bring more than just solutions, more than just a future - may it bring words we don't know yet, and temporalities we have not yet inhabited. May we be slower than speed could calculate, and swifter than the pull of the gravity of words can incarcerate. And may we be visited so thoroughly, and met in wild places so overwhelmingly, that we are left undone. Ready for composting. Ready for the impossible.

Bayo Akomolafe

“I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a [person’s] life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.”
Martin Buber

"We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness."
Albert Einstein

"In our quest for happiness and the avoidance of suffering, we are all fundamentally the same, and therefore equal. Despite the characteristics that differentiate us - race, language, religion, gender, wealth and many others - we are all equal in terms of our basic humanity."
Dalai Lama