Ethics of Life Quotes

“Our passion not to be burned is not the same as the reason for our desire not to be burned. The reason why being burned causes pain is not because it is painful. Here passion is the motive force to take action flowing from the underlying reasons, whether we know them or not (or know evolutionary theory, physics, biology, chemistry and genetics or not). In this case, passion is the slave to conscious or embedded (coded) reason.”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity

“Quick spinning seasons
Where everything speeds
Achingly open spaces
Free for next year’s trees
Identities distilled
To essence
Sapping slowly
Dissolving memory
Hinting of patiently
Waiting eternity

All living things decay
They cannot stay.
Be
Carefully
To gain your
Salvation
Cleave
The bonds
That bind.
Reflect, refract
The undying light

Though we may grieve
There is no staying grief
We are life’s loves
Labours lost
That leaf
Then leave”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity

“Palpitating
Shiver of sea

Sparkling splinter of
Numinous ocean
Gifted personality

The Great Green
Divested of all terror
Its playfulness distilled to
Living livery of wave”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity

“Unless, by chance, you long:
To hear the
Soporific susurrating
Tumbling bumble
Bees at glean in
Myriad-hued meadows

Or the startling
Murmuration of
Starlings curling
Shadows
Athwart the twilit sky;

To scent the earthy musk arising
Whenever tear shaped water falls
From heaven
To cleanse the dust
That blinds us
(Sharp coppery hint
Of a spilt heart)”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity

“many religions have too often failed on their own terms; they are, or have often been, unholy. Their doctrines and structures have been misused to kill, hurt, or steal from non-believers and even those with only slightly different opinions on certain aspects of the ‘truth’.

Preachings of the community of woman and man, of love and compassion, have given way to violence and holy perfidy.

This is similar to how communism’s intended remedy for inequity was more than outweighed by its violence and reduction in our humanity and freedom in the name of equality.”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity

“The concept of humility derives from a word for the soil, humus. A new humility for humanity would enrich us – all we need to do is allow ourselves the happiness that comes when we fall down to the blessed Earth and praise it as one life-form of many. It carries us all, whether we think it or not.”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity

“..we create a culture and language that necessarily assumes we are special. In the face of all the mounting evidence to the contrary, our culture and language suggest that we may be guilty of anthropomorphising life-forms that show us that the assumed ‘human’ qualities are not only human ones.

Talk about stacking the deck against other animals. It is an ugly Orwellian feedback loop. Any approach to truth is lost in a deep corruption of logic and language. This wrong-headedness and unfairness sits very deep within us and our culture; it is time to call it out so we can root it out.”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity

“We are desperate to start a new axial age which will involve a re-flowering of common spiritual customs and communal practices, science and art (i.e., our whole cultural technology) that bind us together and which incorporate the benefits of holiness and reason.”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity

“It is not that species become extinct – all species will eventually become extinct. It is that we hasten extinction for so many species before we even know them or understand them, before we have grasped the way of the world and our place in it – when so much suffering could be avoided, with just a little pause and meditation on this journey of life.

We are not wiser than the animals we kill and the species we are driving to extinction. We are like rampaging bulls, goaded into action by forces we do not understand, trampling through fields full of priceless treasures. We are able to deviate from this thoughtless, violent mediocrity. We must if we are to survive.”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity

“Life-forms are like the molecules of H20 that push against each other to propagate the energy of the wave. We must die in doing so. There is no tragedy in that simple fact. The tragedy is in not knowing it and not seeing its meaning for each other and all life-forms.”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity

“What could be more apt for enlightenment than to return to our earlier evolutionary home in the trees?

Perhaps at the dawn of Homo sapiens and even before, with our ancestral relatives, some beings looked around at teeming life and upwards, above the canopy – to the silvery stars – with a sense of wonder, full of longing for the shining universe and a feeling of belonging on Earth.”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity

“The continuation and chance of life, with all its light and dark, is the only good in itself – including its freedom for pain and suffering”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity

“Humility and compassion are infinite. They are our only refuge and redemption.”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity

“Isn’t much of our great poetry just a rich description of the ‘self’ in fall?

The art keeps alive the feeling of complete control. Yet it is only lyrical mastery of the destruction of the place we thought our home. Our universal lament, the unwantedness of a world where a soul must suffer to grow. The beloved song, resonating the reverberations of a breaking heart.”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity

“Just, for a moment, meditate on the extraordinary improbability: a raw and tiny rock, hurtling through the heavens whilst growing a fragile, living skin; and that skin deciphering how to join the fiery firmament, how to leap between the stars … reaching out towards infinity… ∞

If we must talk of freedom, let us talk about that world. For that is the world we live in, if we could but see it.”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity