Satish Kumar Quotes

How much I can learn from a tree! The tree is my church, the tree is my temple, the tree is my mantra, the tree is my poem and my prayer.

It became extremely important that we go and see the four heads of the governments, and the message was delivered, with the tea packets, to all these heads.

Multinational corporations and a market economy have transformed human beings into instruments of making money. Human beings should be the end. And money should be the means to an end.

At the moment, for example, maybe ten percent of money in the world is related to goods and services. Ninety percent of money is just moving around the world, chasing money. So, money has become the ruler. And we have become the servant.

I was pursuing the inner path at the expense of the rest of my being and the rest of the world.

People are are moving away from the fossil fuel-based economy, to a more renewable economy. That is what is called the 'transition town' movement. There are three hundred towns in Britain that are making this transition. Taking energy from solar power, from wind power, from water power.

If we had adhered to the concept of connectedness, then we would not have created nuclear weapons, huge armies and global warming.

Your children are not your children. They are lives longing for itself. They come here with their own destiny. Give them your love. They will find their own way.

It doesn't matter where or how it is grown as long as it is packaged in plastic, put on the supermarket shelves, and bought as a commodity. In the New Story food is not commodity. Food is sacred. We need to be connected with soil, with animals that we take care of.

The old story is a story of measurement. And the New Story is to bring measurement and meaning together. You cannot measure meaning.

Education provides you a profession. But not vocation. You do it only because you need to work to earn money to buy your food, buy your clothes, pay the bills. Our life has a greater meaning, and a greater purpose.

If we go on using the Earth uncaringly and without replenishing it, then we are just greedy consumers.

We have to shift our attitude of ownership of nature to relationship with nature. The moment you change from ownership to relationship, you create a sense of the sacred.

I want New Story education to be skilling human beings and young people to provide basic human needs. Technology and all other things are icing on the cake.

In the lives of great men, neither did fate give up, NOR DID THEY.

Human happiness, true prosperity and joyful living can only emerge from a life of elegant simplicity, embedded in the arts and crafts.

Our relationship with Nature... best way of forging this relationship... be a pilgrim and not a tourist on Planet Earth

In addition to world conflicts, the most challenging problem we face today is hunger, deprivation and social injustice. Because we're ruled by separate self-interest, we go on accumulating personal wealth, ignoring the well being of the others.

If you can kill animals, the same attitude can kill human beings. The mentality is the same which exploits nature and which creates wars.

Quality and perfection are achieved with time. You do not create a perfect painting or a perfect poem by hurrying. Time is always coming.

The great work of social transformation begins with the first small step of stopping, calming, relaxing, reflecting and acting in a beneficial way.

One was a book I read by Mahatma Gandhi. In it was a passage where he said that religion, the pursuing of the inner journey, should not be separated from the pursuing of the outer and social journey, because we are not isolated beings.

Each of us needs to eliminate our anger, fear and greed. The roots of social conflicts and political tensions are in personal anger, fear and greed.

The children are being conditioned to think that the purpose of life is to get a good job. You get paid but you don't get satisfaction from your work.

You have no skills in your hands. You have no education of understanding the meaning and the purpose and the compassion and the relationship. You have just a profession.

Nature is out there, and we can do what we like to it. We can cut down the rain forest. We can put animals in factory farms and slaughter them as we like. We can over-fish the oceans. We can pollute the rivers. We can pollute the water and change climate. We are somehow superior to nature. We are somehow rulers of nature.

Wars and conflicts begin in the mind, then they are expressed in words and then executed through physical action, so personal transformation is intricately connected with the social and political transformation.

If happiness was in money or power, then America should be the happiest country in the world, but it is not.

Our modern world of old story is completely failing humanity. This is the reason that increasing numbers of people have become and are becoming disillusioned from politics. People don't like voting. Whoever you vote, government gets in. Whatever they promise, they never fulfill.

The road to climate stability is straight and the solutions simple, and yet scientists, economists, industrialists and politicians are busy making them complicated

The scientific world, the materialistic world, the world of commerce, the world of business, the world of individualism, the world of capitalism, world of communism - all these worlds are the old story now. Where we think we exploit nature, we exploit people. Market rules, profit rules, money rules. We work for name, fame, power, money, profit. That's the old story.

Through yoga, meditation and other spiritual practices, we can learn the ways of personal equanimity. We can also learn how to use language in beneficial ways.

Economy without ecology means managing the human nature relationship without knowing the delicate balance between humankind and the natural world

We human beings are spiritual beings. We have soul. We have spirit. We have mind. We have consciousness. We want fulfillment, we want happiness, we want satisfaction, we want joy. We want imagination. We want art, culture, music.

We are not slaves of the market. Our human life has a greater meaning than making money, making profit, and working for the market or for multinational corporations.

Sometimes I come across a tree which seems like Buddha or Jesus: loving, compassionate, still, unambitious, enlightened, in eternal meditation, giving pleasure to a pilgrim, shade to a cow, berries to a bird, beauty to its surroundings, health to its neighbors, branches for the fire, leaves for the soil, asking nothing in return, in total harmony with the wind and the rain. How much can I learn from a tree? The tree is my church, the tree is my temple, the tree is my mantra, the tree is my poem and my prayer.

People are increasingly becoming disappointed and disillusioned with politics and business, and especially with the market economy. They are meeting the physical needs of human beings, maybe. They are providing food. But not good and healthy food.

That was my childhood. I grew up with the monks, studying Sanskrit and meditating for hours in the morning and hours in the evening, and going once a day to beg for food.

There is at the moment in the world a battle going on between those who are pursuing materialistic paths-globalizers of economic growth and those hell-bent on this 'big is better' idea-on the one hand, and on the other hand those who are dedicated to spiritual renewal, more small-scale development, more human scale, more sustainability, more crafts and arts. Where human beings are not just sold to companies and money and those kinds of things. Where human beings have a sacred path.

Of course, we all need to have basic necessities met, such as good health care, good food, good education and good housing. But what is good? Having too much is bad, as having too little is also bad.

This was Mahatma Gandhi’s idea, moving from ownership to relationship—seeing that land does not belong to us. We belong to the land. We are not the owners of the land. We are the friends of the land, like friends of the earth. The fundamental shift is in this consciousness that land does not belong to us, we belong to the land.

Look at what realists have done for us. They have led us to war and climate change, poverty on an unimaginable scale, and wholesale ecological destruction. Half of humanity goes to bed hungry because of all the realistic leaders in the world. I tell people who call me 'unrealistic' to show me what their realism has done. Realism is an outdated, overplayed and wholly exaggerated concept.

Happiness is possible only when we are kind to others and contented within.

So, at the age of nine, I became a monk, and from then on I was there practicing that kind of nonviolence.

We depend on the gifts of nature, but these gifts must be received with gratitude and not exploited or abused

If individuals start to walk on the path of spirit and feel a sense of the sacred connectedness, then social, economic and political problems will also begin to get resolved.

That was my real education in the world - I learned politics, the social and cultural life of India, Hindu tradition and religion, and Buddhism.

We need to learn to live in the here and now; this moment is the best moment. Live it fully.