Native Americans are indigenous people who live simply, are deeply connected to nature, and both fascinate and inspire. In our fast-paced world, their proverbs can be of great value, giving us strength and reminding us of long-forgotten perspectives. Here you will find the best sayings and quotes about hope, peace, togetherness, respect, and life:
Pray to God, but row away from the rocks.
Native American Wisdom
The easiest way to be praised is to die.
Native American Wisdom
We love you more than you love us, for we treat a prisoner like our own children.
Delaware Chief, 1758
Can you not live without them? If you tolerate the English among you, you are dead. Disease, smallpox, and their poison will utterly destroy you.
Neolin, Delaware Prophet, 1761
Listen, or your tongue will make you deaf.
Native American Wisdom
Treat a stone like a plant, a plant like an animal, and an animal like a human being.
Native American Wisdom
One day you will meet a people who are white. They will always try to give you something, but take nothing. In the end, I believe, you will accept what they offer you, and that will make you sick.
Sweet Medicine, Cheyenne Prophet
The hatchet is only buried when no one remembers where it lies.
Native American Wisdom
In a good thought there is goodness for all people.
Native American Wisdom
Cursed be the race that stole our land and turned our warriors into women! From their graves our fathers accuse us of having become slaves and cowards. In the howling of the wind, I hear the great lament of the dead. Their tears pour down from the sighing sky. May the white man perish! The whites seize our land, they corrupt our women, they defile the ashes of our dead. Let us drive them back to where they came from – onto a bloody path!
Tecumseh, Shawnee Chief
No frog drinks up the pond in which it lives.
Native American Wisdom
The people of today do not seek wisdom, but knowledge. Knowledge belongs to the past, wisdom to the future.
Native American Wisdom
Brothers! – My people desire peace; all red men desire peace; but where the white men are, there can be no peace for them, except in the bosom of our mother.
Tecumseh, Shawnee Chief, c. 1811
If you only follow the bear tracks in the snow, you will not see the rabbit right behind you.
Native American Wisdom
Whoever wants to reach the other shore must cross the river one way or another. So why wait?
Native American Wisdom
How they strive to enslave a free people, and call it religion, surpasses my imagination.
William Apess, Pequot, 1836
That which is greater than us teaches all living beings what they must do. We are like the flowers. We live and we die, and of ourselves we know nothing. But that which is greater than us teaches us – teaches us how we should live.
Native American Wisdom