12 Quotes by Ursula Goodenough

The Senegalese conservationist Baba Dioum can summarize: “In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”

The Big Bang, the formation of sars and planets, the origin and evolution of life on this planet, the advent of human consciousness and the resultant evolution of cultures – this is the story, the one story, that has the potential to unite us, because it happens to be true.

The evolution of the cosmos invokes in me a sense of mystery; the increase in biodiversity invokes the response of humility; and an understanding of the evolution of death offers me helpful ways to think about my own death.

We are embedded in the great evolutionary story of planet Earth, the spare, elegant process of mutation and selection and bricolage. And this means that we are anything but alone.

Reverence is the sense that there is something larger than the self, larger even than the human, to which one accords respect and awe and assent.

The concept of an independent spiritual realm does not augment, for me, the magic of the mystical dimension, whereas to think of this dimension as emergent from our minds makes it all the more wondrous to be a human.

Human memory, they say, is like a coat closet: The most enduring outcome of a formal education is that it creates rows of coat hooks so that later on, when you come upon a new piece of information, you have a hook to hang it on. Without a hook, the new information falls on the floor.

Perhaps we should all settle down and think about what’s good in the world and what we want to do here. If we find this planet and its history and its story to be sacred, let’s preserve and nourish it, and then we can go home at night and say whatever prayers we choose.

Human consensus does not generate reality. Were it able to do so, the Sun would have taken to orbiting the Earth some time ago.