If I thought that I was doing it myself, the hole would close up and no power could come through. Then everything I could do would be foolish.
BLACK ELKYou remember that my great vision came to me when I was only nine years old, and you have seen that I was not much good for anything until after I had performed the horse dance near the mouth of the Tongue River during my eighteenth summer.
More Black Elk Quotes
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When we do understand all this deeply in our hearts, then we will fear, and love, and know the Great Spirit, and then we will be and act and live as the Spirit intends.
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Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world….
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It is hard to follow one great vision in this world of darkness and of many changing shadows. Among those men get lost.
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They told me I had been sick twelve days, lying like dead all the while, and that Whirlwind Chaser, who was Standing Bear’s uncle and a medicine man, had brought me back to life.
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It is in the darkness of their eyes that men lose their way.
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Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle.
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And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people as one of many hoops that made one circle.
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I was four years old then, and I think it must have been the next summer that I first heard the voices.
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Let every step you take upon the earth be as a prayer.
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Grown men may learn from very little children, for the hearts of little children are pure, and, therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss.
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I might have been less good to the people than some man who had never dreamed at all, even with the memory of so great a vision in me.
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Each family is a circle, and those family circles connect together and make a community, and the community makes its circle where it lives on the Earth.
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Everything tries to be round.
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I saw more than I can tell / And I understood more than I saw.
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I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead – and that one was myself.
BLACK ELK