Quotes About Totems

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin wonders if "the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death.

Tools are totems, an important weapon in the fight against fear.

The Quraysh collected the totems of the tribes that belonged to their confederacy and installed them in the Haram so that the tribesmen could only worship their patronal deities when they visited Mecca. The sanctity of the Kabah was thus essential to the success and survival of the Quraysh, and their competitors understood this.

The true shaman, the true naturalist, works to reconnect conscious human life with Nature and Spirit through totems and ritual.

We have a need to be religious, we need to worship, we need to build totems and shrines and icons, but nobody's sure in honor of what.

I'm in a secret underground hideout of a group of monster hunters, filled with magical totems, brass monkeys that move and enough firepower to take over a small country.

A flick of a switch reveals a space half homeless-person's midden, half pharaonic tomb. Talismans everywhere: totems, drawings, and cargo cult, laid out on plywood planks spread across sawhorses.

America the Innocent, always searching for the totems of a unity that it can never quite achieve--even, or especially, when its crises of disunity are most pressing. It is one of the structuring stories of our nation. The "return to normalcy" enjoined by Warren Harding after the Great War; the cult of suburban home and hearth after World War II; the union of hearts declaimed by Adams on Boston's Bunker Hill parade ground after the War Between the States.

What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! And when we've done it often enough, the deadening of affect that results makes it easier to do it again. So India's problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in India has happened in God's name. The problem's name is God.

I have known others who could use totems of their own to turn reality inside out. To reshape it like the soft clay it is. There was Craddock McDermott, who claimed that his spirit existed in a favorite suit of his.

The true shaman, the true naturalist, works to reconnect conscious human life with Nature and Spirit through totems and ritual.

The tribe that confuses its totems and symbols with reality has succumbed to fetishism and may be in more trouble than it realises.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have... One... ought to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. . . . One . . . ought to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death - ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It

We will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, armies, flags, & nations; in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me one should rejoice in the fact of death, one out to decide indeed to earn one's death by confronting with passion, the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life. It is that small beacon from that terrifying darkness from wence we come and wence we shall return.

Within our very cells we carry genetic memories of ancestral incarnations. If we awaken these atavisms to conscious life, we can take on their attributes and qualities. These atavistic powers have been known for millennia as: animal totems, helping spirits, maybe even the Gods and Goddesses themselves!

ALL MEN HAVE a religion or totems of some kind. Even the atheist is committed to an enormous act of faith in his belief that the universe created itself and the subsequent creation of intelligent life was simply a biological accident.

We're awash in magical totems. Surrounded by little portholes looking out into infinity, at glimpses of immortality, if you bring it down to earth. The most trivial flotsam and jetsam scattered on the beach and cluttering shelves of junk stores means something, if you look at it from the right angle, through the right sort of spectacles.

It's all part of their system of totems. We've always tried to play along with it, and act as if we believed it.' 'How condescending of you,' said Ender. 'It's standard anthropological practice,' said Miro. 'You're so busy pretending to believe them, there isn't a chance in the world you could learn anything from them.