"The oldest truth is found in stories. Stories carry the wisdom of our ancestors and the spirit of the earth."

~Lakota saying

"The stories are our maps. They show us how to live and what to value. Without them, we are lost."

~Navajo (Diné):

"The one who tells the stories rules the world. Stories carry the seeds of wisdom; they can nurture life or destroy it."

~Hopi

"Ko te kai a te rangatira he kōrero" – "The food of chiefs is talk, conversation, storytelling."

~Māori

"Stories are the pathways to understanding the law of the land. To tell the story is to care for country and community." 

~Australian Aboriginal

"When the last story is told, the soul forgets its way. Stories help the heart remember who we are."

~Inuit

"Wisdom sits in places. To know the story of a place is to know the wisdom of our ancestors who lived here."

~Apache

"I ka ʻōlelo no ke ola, i ka ʻōlelo nō ka make."
"In the language there is life, in the language there is death."
~Hawaiian Quotes on Sacred Storytelling

"ʻAʻohe pau ka ʻike i ka hālau ho’okahi."
"All knowledge is not taught in the same school."
~Hawaiian Quotes on Sacred Storytelling

"Nānā ka maka; hoʻolohe ka pepeiao; paʻa ka waha."
"Observe with the eyes; listen with the ears; shut the mouth."
~Hawaiian Quotes on Sacred Storytelling

"E mālama pono i ka ʻike a ka makua he hei na ke keiki."
– "Hold fast to the knowledge of the elders so it becomes a legacy for the children."
~Hawaiian Quotes on Sacred Storytelling

“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.”

~Sue Monk Kid

“To follow Story is to understand the path of healing. Each of our stories is a universe. Each one of us is living a story. To discover its shape and essence is essential to soul making.”
~Deena Metzger

"People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell."

~Elie Wiesel

"Life is a storied proposition. Not a theoretical or hypothetical thing. It’s a storied thing. In that sense story is deeply trustworthy. Because it seems to resemble the way life literally seems to unfold. Which is why the preliterate cultures (which is a terrible thing to call anybody) are principally or

al cultures. Their entire means of reckoning and understanding, recognizing, relating, loving… are born along by story…story as a verb.”
~Stephen Jenkinson

"The business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up."
~Martin Shaw

“The way we experience story will evolve, but as storytelling animals, we will no more give it up than start walking on all fours.”
~Jonathan Gottschall

"Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become." ~Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets, but I have found that when I silently commune with people they give up their secrets also – if you love them enough.”

~George Washington Carver

"It’s often in the waiting that the stories come. Not the human fireside banter, but a kind of slow emergence from the tree line -- a mist of story. This is the earthy fulcrum from where stories of a place emerge -- about that cave, that estuary, that rowan tree. Not in the clipped tempo of a written sentence, but in a galloping, roaming rampant language that tears into the soul like the vivid colors of a jungle bird.”
~Martin Shaw

We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or be seen. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then become a story-teller."
~Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

“If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar.”
~John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“That’s what storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again.”
~Walt Disney, in Saving Mr. Banks

"The engineers of the future will be poets."
~Terence McKenna

There is a light in this world, a healing spirit more powerful than any darkness we may encounter. It emerges through the lives of ordinary people who hear a call and answer in extraordinary ways.

~Mother Teresa

Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.
~Terry Tempest Williams

"Great art can communicate before it is understood."
~TS Eliot

“What do you suppose creation is? What do you suppose will satisfy the Soul, except to walk free, and own no superior? What do you suppose I have intimated to you in a hundred ways, but that man or woman is as good as God? And that there is no God any more divine than Your-self? And that that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean? And that you or any one must approach Creations through such laws?”

~Walt Whitman

The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.
~ Sri Nisargadatta