Gregory Bateson Quotes

When you're a young child, you pick a totem animal, and you just identify with it to the point of wishing you were that animal.

To be religious is to be sensitive to reality.

All spiritual interests are supported by animal life.

When someone you love truly dies, you have to find them over and over again in the world, and I think you do that on a very psychic, unconscious level, and I think in some ways I was calling out to that spirit of my mother when I saw the fox. It doesn't surprise me it's in animals that I find my mother.

If I haven't received any grace today, then I was not at home. This is because God is sending deliveries constantly.

Animals teach us about the animals in ourselves. We need their spirits.

Prayer is a grace through which we pour ourselves out before God and through which He calls us into His presence.

What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.

We humans should never forget our capacity to connect with the collective spirit of animals. Their energy is essential to our future growth.

My paintings are reflections of my own inner mysteries... they all reflect my relationship to my steadiest of companions and muses - nature and animals.

When a stray animal crosses your path, it may be as close to God as you're going to get in this lifetime.

I don't like to go into subways, because I always see them [ mice]. They are like my naguales [kindred animal spirits]. They follow me. I have literally stepped off of a plane in Phoenix and gotten my bag and stepped out on the curb and they'll be a big desert rat walking right in front of me.

I call animals "guardians of Being," especially animals that live with humans. Because, for many humans, it's through their contact with animals they get in touch with that level of being.

Passion begins where your bodies unite and ends where your souls dance. When your spirits can join together at the same time as your bodies become one, then all of you will be making love. There will be nothing left between you that is not love. This is sacred communion. This is ecstasy.

Prayer is the opening of the heart to God as to a friend. Not that it is necessary in order to make known to God what we are, but in order to enable us to receive Him. Prayer does not bring God down to us, but brings us up to Him.

Maine should be pleased that its animal is not a waverer, and rather than fight, lets the primed quill fall. Shallow oppressor, intruder, insister, you have found a resister.

My prayers seem to be more of an attitude than anything else. I indulge in very little lip service, but ask the Great Creator silently, daily, and often many times a day, to permit me to speak to Him through the three great Kingdoms of the world which He has created - the animal, mineral, and vegetable Kingdoms - to understand their relations to each other, and our relations to them and to the Great God who made all of us. I ask Him daily and often momently to give me wisdom, understanding, and bodily strength to do His will; hence I am asking and receiving all the time.

Remember: He WANTS your fellowship, and He has done everything possible to make it a reality. He has forgiven your sins, at the cost of His own dear Son. He has given you His Word, and the priceless privilege of prayer and worship.

We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea.

The fruits of this profound union with Jesus are marvelous: our whole being is transformed by the grace of the Holy Spirit: soul, intelligence, will, affections and even the body, because we are united in body and spirit.

I have had mystical experiences with horses. I felt they were communicating with me in horse communication.

Growing up, Catholic church really was such an incubator for my imagination, because all of those mysteries felt embedded in this insanely green, tropical landscape: the ocean nearby, the giant banyan trees. It all felt part of one seamless mystery to me.

Forms and rituals do not produce worship, nor does the disuse of forms and rituals. We can use all the right techniques and methods, we can have the best possible liturgy, but we have not worshiped the Lord until Spirit touches spirit.

All those animals that were in the cages, I would spend a lot of time in those cages with the animals in-between shots, just hanging out, because I prefer animals to humans. If I get an opportunity to be with them, I'll usually take it.

Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what's common in human experience and turns it into something holy.