Animism Quotes

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”
― William Wordsworth, The Major Works

“Shapeshifting requires the ability to transcend your attachments, in particular your ego attachments to identity and who you are. If you can get over your attachment to labeling yourself and your cherishing of your identity, you can be virtually anybody. You can slip in and out of different shells, even different animal forms or deity forms.”
― Zeena Schreck

“The material world is all feminine. The feminine engergy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men (are of the feminine energy). We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.”
― Zeena Schreck

“He'd grown unused to woods like this. He'd become accustomed to the Northwest, evergreen and shaded dark. Here he was surrounded by soft leaves, not needles; leaves that carried their deaths secretly inside them, that already heard the whispers of Autumn. Roots and branches that knew things.”
― Michael Montoure, Slices

“Understanding the physiological and neurological features of spiritual experiences should not be interpreted as an attempt to discredit their reality or explain them away. Rather, it demonstrates their physical existence as a fundamental, shared part of human nature. Spiritual experiences cannot be considered irrational, since we have seen that, given their physiological basis, experiencers' descriptions of them are perfectly rational... All human perceptions of material reality can ultimately be documented as chemical reactions in our neurobiology; all our sensations, thoughts, and memories are ultimately reducible to chemistry, yet we feel no need to deny the existence of the material world; it is not less real because our perceptions of it are biologically based... It is not rational to assume that the spiritual reality of core experiences is any less real than the more scientifically documentable material reality.”
― Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America

“There are Tantrics who deliberately seek to do more active forms of renunciation, so transgression of social norms and breaking of taboo, and breaking of social taboos especially, is a form of renunciation.”
― Zeena Schreck

“Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion---until we teach them not to.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“It is now generally admitted, at any rate by philosophers, that the existence of a being having the attributes which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot be demonstratively proved... [A]ll utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical.”
― Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic

“It is a well known fact that even among highly cultured peoples the belief in animism prevails generally. Even the scholar may kick the chair against which he accidentally stumbles, and derive great satisfaction from thus 'getting even' with the perverse chair.”
― Holly Estil Cunningham, An Introduction to Philosophy

“As all things come from and are imbued with the quintessence of Spirit, all things are holy and alive in their own right—and anything that has a physical existence contains within it a unique personality, energy, and expression of Spirit.”
― Mat Auryn, Psychic Witch: A Metaphysical Guide to Meditation, Magick & Manifestation

“Remembering place is significant, and that includes each visitor to a place, insect, plant, animal, or the passing shadow of a cloud in golden sunlight.”
― Linda Hogan

“Our flesh has never been a boundary for the human being. We only reach out from there to occupy the space around us. Even more significantly, it occupies us.”
― Linda Hogan

“I have come to know witchcraft as the art of connection and relationship, and working with that connection and relationship through cause and effect to create inner and outer changes.”
― Mat Auryn, Maîtriser la magie: Le manuel complet pour augmenter la puissance de votre magie

“Everything is full of gods, ‘ cousin James once said, quoting somebody.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Everything is full of gods, cousin James once said, quoting somebody.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“the important question is not whether all rocks are alive but whether specific humans relate appropriately (respectfully) with specific rocks”
― Linda Hogan

“Who will listen any more to their long, slow songs; who understands the language of stones? Not these people, for sure. They don't even know that the stones are alive.”
― Sharon Blackie, Foxfire, Wolfskin and Other Stories of Shapeshifting Women

“In the beginning of time people and animals lived together on the earth and there was no difference between them. Bear, human, raven, fox, even snow and ice, all had spirit, all had soul. The air was pure and clear as crystal. Words held a magic. A word spoken in a chance, a wish or a whisper would hold a magic that would shape the world.”
― Jackie Morris, The Ice Bear

“To the Hindu mind there was no real gap between animals and men; animals as well as men had souls, and souls were perpetually passing from men into animals, and back again; all these species were woven into one infinite web of Karma and reincarnation. The elephant, for example, became the god Ganesha, and was recognized as Shiva’s son; he personified man’s animal nature, and at the same time his image served as a charm against evil fortune. Monkeys and snakes were terrible, and therefore divine. The cobra or naga, whose bite causes almost immediate death, received especial veneration; annually the people of many parts of India celebrated a religious feast in honor of snakes, and made offerings of milk and plantains to the cobras at the entrance to their holes. Temples have been erected in honor of snakes, as in eastern Mysore; great numbers of reptiles take up their residence in these buildings, and are fed and cared for by the priests.”
― Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage

“Tennyson, you remember, says, ‘the cedars sigh for Lebanon,’ and that is exquisite poetry, but Blackwood believes the cedars really do sigh for Lebanon.”
― Arthur Machen

“In the animist world, objects and living things are not the only animated
beings. There are also immaterial entities – the spirits of the dead, and friendly
and malevolent beings, the kind that we today call demons, fairies and angels.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“In England, a portion of land called "the good man's field" (gudeman's croft) was allowed to survive into the seventeenth century. This was a piece of land that was never plowed or planted and was instead allowed to lie fallow. No one harbored any doubt that it was reserved for some spirit or demon. What we have in gudeman is not the adjective good but the Anglo-Saxon noun god (the Germanic Guda).”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind

“Witchcraft is a path that works with spirits. Whether these are the disincarnate spirits of the once living or the conscious presences within a plant, bone, stone, or other curio matters very little.”
― Storm Faerywolf, Betwixt & Between: Exploring the Faery Tradition of Witchcraft

“The way nails sometimes insist on bending when you hammer, as if they were trying to. Or the way machinery refuses to work. Matter's funny stuff. In large aggregates, it obeys natural law, but when you get down to the individual atom or electron, it's largely a matter of chance or whim—”
― Fritz Leiber, Dark Ladies: Conjure Wife/Our Lady of Darkness

“Jiko says that everything has a spirit, even if it is old and useless, and we must console and honor the things that have served us well”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“İnsanların, kayalara yapışan istiridyeler gibi, başkalarının acılarına yapışmak gibi tuhaf bir saplantıları var. Başıma gelen şey onları kendileriyle yüzleştiriyor sanki. Bu trajedi organlarının, derilerinin altına uzun süre önce gömülmüş duyguları, fevkalade sahici oldukları için taşınamayacak derecede ağırlaşan hisleri yeniden canlandırıyor sanki.”
― Nastassja Martin, In the Eye of the Wild

“This does not mean (as is so often thought) that primitive man, in order to explain natural phenomena, imparts human characteristics to an inanimate world. Primitive man simply does not know an inanimate world. For this very reason he does not 'personify' inanimate phenomena nor does he fill an empty world with the ghosts of the dead, as 'animism' would have us believe.

The world appears to primitive man neither inanimate nor empty but redundant with life; and life has individuality, in man and beast and plant, and in every phenomenon which confronts man — the thunderclap, the sudden shadow, the eerie and unknown clearing in the wood, the stone which suddenly hurts him when he stumbles while on a hunting trip. Any phenomenon may at any time face him, not as 'It', but as 'Thou'. In this confrontation, 'Thou' reveals its individuality, its qualities, its will. 'Thou' is not contemplated with intellectual detachment; it is experienced as life confronting life, involving every faculty of man in a reciprocal relationship. Thoughts, no less than acts and feelings, are subordinated to this experience.”
― Henri Frankfort, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man

“People forget that humans are animals too, that we're just as much a part of the wild places as the things that live in them.”
― Vincent H. O'Neil. O'Neil, Interlands

“Before discussing the 'relinking' of people and forests through community forestry, it is important to understand where the 'delinking' paradigm, superimposed onto Tanzania and elsewhere during colonial times originated. The separation of people and nature has deep-rooted conceptual origins, for example early Judeo-Christian texts explicitly framed humans as exceptional and separate from nature as opposed to many animist religions that placed humans within nature. The conceptual separation is particularly strong in Europe, as reflected in the origins of certain words, with the Latin word foestis originating from a meaning 'outside', as in a wild place outside human control.

Such 'wild places' later became the hunting reserves of elites in Europe in the form of exclusionary Royal Forests, 'commoners' were kept out. A few centuries later, during the period of Enlightenment and into industrialisation and urbanisation, livelihoods in countries like Britain are further delinked from nature, The division between [eople and nature has become so heavily engrained in modern industrialised society that 'wilderness' has attained a romantic idealisation.”
― Peter O'Hara, Reforesting Scotland 71, Spring/Summer 2025

“Then Tom hurried on. Rain began to shiver,
round rings spattering in the running river;
a wind blew, shaken leaves chilly drops were dripping;
into a sheltering hole Old Tom went skipping.

Out came Badger-brock with his snowy forehead
and his dark blinking eyes. In the hill he quarried
with his wife and many sons. By the coat they caught him,
pulled him inside their earth, down their tunnels brought him.

Inside their secret house, there they sat a-mumbling:
'Ho, Tom Bombadil' Where have you come tumbling,
bursting in the front-door? Badger-folk have caught you.
You'll never find it out, the way that we have brought you!'

'Now, old Badger-brock, do you hear me talking?
You show me out at once! I must be a-walking.
Show me to your backdoor under briar-roses;
then clean grimy paws, wipe your earthy noses!
Go back to sleep again on your straw pillow,
like fair Goldberry and Old Man Willow!'

Then all the Badger-folk said: 'We beg your pardon!'
They showed Tom out again to their thorny garden,
went back and hid themselves, a-shivering and a-shaking,
blocked up all their doors, earth together raking.”
― Tolkien J.R.R