36 Quotes by Jay Griffiths

A wild creature is not subject to any will except its own.

If people can’t acknowledge the wisdom of indigenous cultures, then that’s their loss.

The silencing of the rainforests is a double deforestation, not only of trees but a deforestation of the mind’s music, medicine and knowledge.

All definitions of wilderness that exclude people seem to me to be false. African ‘wilderness’ areas are racist because indigenous people are being cleared out of them so white people can go on holiday there.

Just because Galileo was a heretic doesn’t make every heretic a Galileo.

I don’t write quickly, and I don’t want to.

I’m not against entertainment: if someone wants to read nonsense-mongers, let them, but I resent the appearance of parity between two articles on an issue as serious as climate change when one article is actually gibberish masked in pseudoscience and the other is well informed and accurate.

Language is wild – you can’t fence it or tell it what to do – and it’s the same with people. Even under the worst excesses of Stalinism or consumerism, the human spirit will still express itself.

There are galaxies within the human mind, and madness wants to risk everything for the daring flight, reckless and beautiful and crazed. Everyone knows Icarus fell. But I love him for the fact that he dared to fly. Mania unfurls the invitation to fly too high, too near the sun, which will melt the wax of the mind, and the fall will be terrible.