Quotes about respect

Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect, you have enough; and when you have enough, you have self-respect.

How they treat you is about who they are, not who you are.

Emotionally mature people may tell you how they feel about what you did, but they don’t pretend to know you better than you know yourself.

One’s emotions are one’s own; to suggest that others should imitate them is to impose on the personal integrity of others.

When I was small, my mother often told me that animals, insects, and plants are to be treated with the kind of respect one customarily accords to high-status adults. “Life is a circle, and everything has its place in it,” she would say. That’s how I met the sacred hoop, which has been an integral part of my life.

To address a person as “mother” is to pay the highest ritual respect.

Science can be a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species that is rivaled only by the observations of traditional knowledge holders. It can be a path to kinship.

The teachings tell us that a harvest is made honorable by what you give in return for what you take.

Sustainable harvesting can be the way we treat a plant with respect, by respectfully receiving its gift.

Respect one another, support one another, bring your gift to the world and receive the gifts of others, and there will be enough for all.

In weaving well-being for land and people, we need to pay attention to the lessons of the three rows. Ecological well-being and the laws of nature are always the first row. Without them, there is no basket of plenty. Only if that first circle is in place can we weave the second. The second reveals material welfare, the subsistence of human needs. Economy built upon ecology. But with only two rows in place, the basket is still in jeopardy of pulling apart. It’s only when the third row comes that the first two can hold together. Here is where ecology, economics, and spirit are woven together. By using materials as if they were a gift, and returning that gift through worthy use, we find balance. I think that third row goes by many names: Respect. Reciprocity. All Our Relations. I think of it as the spirit row. Whatever the name, the three rows represent recognition that our lives depend on one another, human needs being only one row in the basket that must hold us all. In relationship, the separate splints become a whole basket, sturdy and resilient enough to carry us into the future.

By honoring the knowledge in the land, and caring for its keepers, we start to become indigenous to place.