Holistic Thinking Quotes

On a grassroots level we say that man can touch more than he can grasp.

Environmental pollution, terrorism, and many other global threats do not stop at borders. We all bear global responsibility and thus need a global identity to enable us to cope with them. We must learn to integrate different levels of identity in ourselves. What matters is not either/or, but both/and.

Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Many Indians have told me that the most basic difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that Westerners view the world as dead, and not as filled with speaking, thinking, feeling subjects as worthy and valuable as themselves.

Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.

You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe.

Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything.

There is an increasing awareness of the interrelatedness of things. We are becoming less prone to accept an immediate solution without questioning its larger implications.

Man is designed to be a comprehensivist .

I had the good fortune to be able to take a course with Margaret Mead. I had a fabulous art course, where it was explained to me that nothing exists in a vacuum, that everything is a result of the period in which it's done - the economics, the sociology, the politics, all sewn together. That was a very important lesson.

From time to time, it is worth wandering around the fuzzy border regions of what you do, if only to remind yourself that no human activity is an island.

Under the discipline of unity, knowledge and morality come together. No longer can we have that paltry 'objective' knowledge so prized by the academic specialists. To know anything at all becomes a moral predicament. Aware that there is no such thing as a specialized effect, one becomes responsible for judgments as well as facts. Aware that as an agricultural scientist he had 'one great subject,' Sir Albert Howard could no longer ask, What can I do with what I know? without at the same time asking, How can I be responsible for what I know?

Sacred play is anything that takes you into that right hemisphere of your brain. It turns out that this move away from left to the right hemisphere, that sense of expansiveness and everything, can be accomplished through unusual rhythmic action, or any action that requires so much attention away from words that you cannot think in words.

I'm trying to champion the naturalist's worldview and show it's not as heathen as most religious people would make it out to be.

I look at the big picture and try not to create with ego.

Treat the world like a head.

Valuing the road over the goal was a Taoist goal in itself.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

We never try to think in terms of any competitive product or company. If you do that, you just focus on a certain narrow area. Rather, we should think much more broadly.

There are no simple solutions to today’s problems.

I now know that inspirations must come from everywhere.

If human life is to survive on this planet, the old dualistic worldview, with people on one side and the environment on the other, must yield to a new vision that connects us with everything else and leads us to care for and take responsibility for it.