Wangari Maathai Quotes

Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.

I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear. That is our duty.

I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future.

A thought often makes us hotter than a fire.

One must always be aware, to notice even though the cost of noticing is to become responsible.

There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase.

What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.

Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface.

With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was candles, did she think she'd done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?

To know is to care, to care is to act, to act is to make a difference.

Two things, almost incompatible, are united in me in a manner which I am unable to understand: a very ardent temperament, lively and tumultuous passions, and, at the same time, slowly developed and confused ideas, which never present themselves until it is too late. One might say that my heart and my mind do not belong to the same person.

The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn't really our solitude.

By my physical constitution I am but an ordinary man ... Yet some great events, some cutting expressions, some mean hypocracies, have at times thrown this assemblage of sloth, sleep, and littleness into rage like a lion.

The trouble with really seeing and really hearing is that then we really have to do something about what we have seen and heard.

The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.

There's a storm inside of us. I've heard many team guys speak of this. A burning. A river. A drive.

The great sins and fires break out of me like the terrible leaves from the bough in the violent spring. I am a walking fire, I am all leaves.

When you are in anger, in passion, violent, aggressive, you feel a crystallized ego within you. Whenever you are in love, in compassion, it is not there.

There's such a fierce intense fire burning inside of me, so much that it just wants to explode.

We become responsible for the actions of others the instant we become conscious of what they are doing wrong and fail to remind them of what is right.

I urge you by all this is dear, by all that is honorable, by all that is sacred, not only that you pray but also that you act!

If you but knew the flames that burn in me which I attempt to beat down with my reason.