Perhaps we cannot raise the winds. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it.

Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's enduring powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed.

From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human, surrender to the forces of evil.

Even bigger machines, entailing even bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the nonviolent, the elegant and beautiful.

Many of them had a better time than they ever had in their lives because they were discovering the new freedom - the less you need, the freer you become.

I'm not at all contemptuous of comforts, but they have their place and it is not first.

Many people love in themselves what they hate in others