Shoghi Effendi Quotes

The environment is in us, not outside of us. The trees are our lungs, the rivers our bloodstream. We are all interconnected, and what you do to the environment ultimately you do to yourself.

All is connected... no one thing can change by itself.

We have an impact on nature, and nature has an impact on us.

It's weird, like, my life has always imitated art, and my art has always imitated life.

Human science and religion have kept company together and greatly assisted each other's progress in the world. I do not say that intellectual and moral qualities are in the same proportion in particular persons; but they have a great and friendly influence upon one another in societies and larger bodies.

Culture affects development and development affects culture as well.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

We are always influenced because we do not live in a vacuum together with our intentions. We are in a relationship with everything that occurs.

Mark Zuckerberg is the product of Facebook just as surely as Facebook is the product of Mark Zuckerberg.

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.

A being connected with other beings cannot perform his own activities without taking the activities of others into account. For they are the indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies. When he moves he stirs them and reciprocally.

Everyone alters and is altered by everyone else. We are all the time taking in portions of one another or else reacting against them, and by these involuntary acquisitions and repulsions modifying our natures.

When I’m working with materials it’s not just the leaf or the stone, it’s the processes that are behind them that are important. That’s what I’m trying to understand, not a single isolated object but nature as a whole.

Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart.

We evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling.

When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward toward the futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We should look within; the paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity.

A tree is a thought, an obstruction stopping the flow of wind and light, trapping water, housing insects, birds, and animals, and breathing in and out. How treelike the human, how human the tree.

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind.

Souls and bodies should go on together.

Every arena of life intersects with what's going on in our hearts. Everything passes through on its way to wherever it's going. Everything.

We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men

The profound political changes we need in order to heal our planet will not come about through fragmented problem solving or intellectual analyses that overlook the deepest yearnings and intuitions of the heart....As we begin to cultivate a rich inner life and experience our connection with all life, we realize how little of what society tells us we need is actually important for our well-being....Green politics must address the spiritual vacuum of industrial society.

And I don't mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.

Since no man ever can, or could, live by himself and for himself alone, the destinies of thousands of other people were bound to be affected, some remotely, but some very directly and near-at-hand, by my own choices and decisions and desires, as my own life would also be formed and modified according to theirs.

Families are ecosystems. Each life grows in response to the lives around it