"When the stranger says, 'What is the meaning of this city? Do you huddle together because you love each other?' What will you answer? 'We all dwell together to make money from each other', or, 'This is a community.'" - T.S. Elliot
“Economic things only matter insofar as they make people happier.” - Andrew Oswald
"Consumption distracts people. You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption." - Noam Chomsky
"Capitalism denies the right to live. You have only the right to remain on the labour market."
- Noam Chomsky
"All the money, all the prestige in the world will never make up for the loss of your freedom." - George Monbiot
"Of fame or life which do you hold more dear?
Of life or wealth to which would you adhere?
Keep life and lose the other things;
keep them and lose your life --
which brings sorrow and pain more near?
Thus we may see who clings to fame rejects what is more great.
Who loves large stores gives up the richer state.
Who is content need fear no shame.
Who knows to stop incurs no blame.
From danger free
long live shall he."
- adapted by Ellen Kei Hua
"The opposite of consumption is not thrift - it is generosity."
- Raj Patel
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"If we, as a society, lose our voice completely, and corporations start doing all the talking, then we'll be utterly lost. To some degree, this has already happened. Our ability to envision a future collectively has already been severely compromised.". ~ Kalle Lasn
"Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get." - W.P. Kinsella
"We have no right to luxuries while the poor want bread." - Thomas Day
"The greatest part of our happiness depends on our dispositions, not our circumstances."
- Martha Washington
"One is happy as a result of one's own efforts once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience." - George Sand
"What do you want most to do? That's what I have to keep asking myself, in the face of difficulties." - Katherine Mansfield
"At times, the biggest challenge in embracing simplicity will be the vague feeling of isolation that comes with it, since private sacrifice doesn’t garner much attention in the frenetic world of mass culture." - Rolf Potts
“Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing…” – Walt Whitman
“I have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.” - Henry David Thoreau
“Very many people spend money in ways quite different from those that their natural tastes would enjoin, merely because the respect of their neighbors depends upon their possession of a good car and their ability to give good dinners. As a matter of fact, any man who can obviously afford a car but genuinely prefers travels or a good library will in the end be much more respected than if he behaved exactly like everyone else.” – Bertrand Russell
"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." - T.S. Eliot
"If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito." - African Proverb
"God respects me when I work, and loves me when I sing and dance." - Sufi expression
"The training to obey the work and consumer ethic has taken place against the grain and in the face of enormous resistance. We now look upon that resistance as not just futile, but immoral. The Luddites are dismissed as criminally obtuse, and anyone who confesses to being content with what is sufficient and unwilling to work and earn and consume beyond that level of sustenance is dangerously antisocial and morally impaired by Sloth." - Wade Rowland
"If you are afraid of death, you are afraid of life, for living your life leads to death. Until you face death and see its beauty, you will be afraid to really live." - Granny D
"It is absurd for an individual to doubt his sensing of external things, yet man is easily caught by illusions." - Aristotle
"The mind can go in a thousand directions.
But on this beautiful path, I walk in peace.
With each step, a gentle wind blows.
With each step, a flower blooms."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
"Contrary to popular stereotypes, seeking simplicity doesn’t require that you become a monk, a subsistence forager, or a wild-eyed revolutionary. Nor does it mean that you must unconditionally avoid the role of consumer. Rather, simplicity merely requires a bit of personal sacrifice: an adjustment of your habits and routines within consumer society itself." - Rolf Potts
"Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity,
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires."
- Lao-tzu
"Dying is no big deal. Living is the trick." - Red Smith
"Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.... Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually, needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have." -- Henry David Thoreau "Because of the dogma of workerism, unemployment is a problem rather than the boon to humanity that it should be." - Len Bracken
"The exploitation of cuteness, convenience or fashion manipulates people's reactions and emotions unscrupulously, it represents the engineering of desire. To put it differently: convenience is the enemy of excellence; fashion is the enemy of integrity; cuteness is the enemy of beauty." - Victor Papanek
"The citizen's job is to be rude - to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt." - John Ralston Saul
"Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you riding through the ruts, don't complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy. Don't bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality. Wake Up and Live!" - Bob Marley
"The more you chase money, the harder it is to catch it." - Mike Tatum
Zinn"There is a joy in going without things, a fine tang in eliminating the superfluous." - Elbert Hubbard
"To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury; and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable; and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasion, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony." - William Henry Channing
"We need new ideas, we need to combine the existing new ideas, we need to challenge advertising and growth-led models. Degrowth is a challenge to economic growth and GDP-led models of development, which means that we produce and consume less and share more." - Francois Schneider.
"We are vainly trying to return to a bubble economy, of the sort that once handed us the illusion of wealth, rather than confront the stark reality that lies ahead." - Chris Hedges
"We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it." —Wendell Berry
"I experience true freedom when I accept, understand, and move on from the conditioning of the past." - Deepak Chopra"Bread deals with living things, with giving life, with growth, with the seed, the grain that nurtures. It is not coincidence that we say bread is the staff of life." - Lionel Poilane
"We can describe voluntary simplicity as a manner of living that is outwardly more simple and inwardly more rich, a way of being in which our most authentic and alive self is brought into direct and conscious contact with living." - Duane Elgin
"Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you." - Lao Tzu
" A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap."
- Arnold J. Toynbee
"All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"I have never been in a natural place and felt that it was a waste of time. I never have. And it's a relief. If I'm walking around a desert or whatever, every second is worthwhile."
- Viggo Mortensen
"I know the joy of fishes in the river through my own joy, as I go walking along the same river." - Zhuangzi
"I love walking down the street and seeing the faces and drama and happiness and sadness and dirt and cleanliness." - Ric Ocasek
"I may not be walking with you all the way, or even much of the way, as I walk with you now."
- Arthur Ashe
"Walking articulates both physical and mental freedom." - Rebecca Solnit
"They take great pride in making their dinner cost much; I take my pride in making my dinner cost so little." - Henry David Thoreau
"No yoga exercise, no meditation in a chapel filled with music will rid you of your blues better than the humble task of making your own bread." - M.F.K. Fisher
"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about." - Charles Kingsley
"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware." - Henry Miller
"He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon little." - Horace
“The only revolution that might work is a consumer revolution. We stop buying products produced by slave labor and stop working for companies that enslave us.” — Anonymous
"Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century." - Greg Egan
“If I have a right to life I have a right to living space… I wasn’t born with dollars in my pocket. I shouldn’t have to chase the big buck all my life just for a place to live.” - Barbara Oke.
The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces, over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. - E.F. Schumacher, 1973
"I did study the art of being a barber because I wanted to figure out what my routine would be. Do you start in the front or back? Top or bottom? Swivel the chair or walk around? What I did discover is there's no such thing as the perfect haircut! - Sean Patrick Thomas
"Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear. - Aesop
"There can be no peace as long as there is grinding poverty, social injustice, inequality, oppression, environmental degradation, and as long as the weak and small continue to be trodden by the mighty and powerful." - 14th Dalai Lama
"Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas." - Paul Samuelson
"I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival." - Kurt Vonnegut
"If you realized how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought."
-Peace Pilgrim
"The unexamined life is not worth living." - Socrates
"Beer. Now there's a temporary solution." - Homer Simpson
"Home is where one starts from." - T.S. Eliot
"I could eat my own weight in sushi." - Mikey Way
"The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back." - Ram Dass
"People living deeply have no fear of death." - Anais Nin
"A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book." - Irish Proverb
"Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little." - Venerable Cheng Yen
"A Big Mac - the communion wafer of consumption." - John Ralston Saul
"There’s only one way to avoid the collapse of this human experiment of ours on Planet Earth: we have to consume less."Adbusters
"If a global civilization can self-organize from our current chaos, it will be founded on cooperation rather than winner-take-all competition, sufficiency rather than surfeit, communal solidarity rather than individual elitism, and reasserting the sacred nature of all earthly life." - Daniel Pinchbeck
"The stage is now set for direct competition for grain between the 800 million people who own automobiles (using grain for bio-fuel), and the world's two billion poorest people (using grain for food)." - Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute
"Guess who wins." - Gwynne Dyer
“By shifting our mind-set we can actually recognize the coming post-cheap oil era as an opportunity rather than a threat, and design the future low carbon age to be thriving, resilient and abundant.”
- R Hopkins and. Lipman
"A paradox is something that does not make sense.
In the case of a koan, it is how we think that does not make sense.
Once our mind is capable of seeing things more simply,
there ceases to be a paradox."
- find examples of koans here.
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