I think it is a good thing to buy less and choose well – it’s good for the environment and to be fair it’s also good for me because my clothes are quite expensive.

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends… Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

In most mills, only the best portions of the best trees are used, while the ruins are left on the ground to feed great fires which kill much of what is left of the less desirable timber, together with the seedlings on which the permanence of the forest depends.

The Tao teaches us to let go of things. Use the 80/20 rule. If you take all your clothes, you’ll find out that you only wear 20 percent of them. Take what you have and don’t use and circulate it. Give stuff to people who truly need it. After all, we come into this world with nothing; we leave this world with nothing.

This is absolutely bizarre that we continue to subsidize highways beyond the gasoline tax, airlines, and we don’t subsidize, we don’t want to subsidize a national rail system that has environmental impact.

I live on the West Coast of the United States, and yet the air that I breathe is sometimes the same air that was being breathed in China the day before.

I don’t spend too much time on my phone, laptop or television. However, I do occasionally watch documentaries and shows on streaming platforms.

I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We’ve kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don’t need. I’m anti-consumerism; I own four pairs of black Levis and that’s it.

Some people have a hard time getting rid of stuff. If that’s you, pray for God to give you the courage to get rid of things you don’t really need or things He wants you to give away. This will help keep your surroundings organized and clutter-free.

I have rooms full of little dongly things and don’t want any more. Half the little dongly things I’ve got, I don’t even know what gizmo they’re for. More importantly, half the gizmos I’ve got, I don’t know where their little dongly thing is.

Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.

Personally, I don’t wear fur.

If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before? Why were there no restrictions? Why wasn’t it made illegal? To me, that did not add up.

I’m generous. I give good tips. It’s just – the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don’t want anything. I’m not a consumer. I don’t crave objects.

All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.

We will have to leave this planet, and we’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better.

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.

By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited… The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

We should no longer measure our wealth and success in the graph that shows economic growth, but in the curve that shows the emissions of greenhouse gases.

I’m frugal. I’m not a very acquisitive woman. I never waste food. If you prepare your own food, you engage with the world, it tastes alive. It tastes good.

Sweden is not a green paradise, it has one of the biggest carbon footprints.

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We’re inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, ‚Gimme, gimme, gimme,‘ you will always be in short supply.

Manifest plainness, embrace simplicity, reduce selfishness, have few desires.

I have a company, and I’ve got to think about that. I’m trying to do my best there, and that’s a much harder task. We recycle as much as possible, and we conserve. But I’ve always been one to save everything – I even walk up stairs on the very inside or the very outside to not wear out the tread.

A place for everything, everything in its place.

A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.

I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make – and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn’t quite work.

The extraction of oil, coal and minerals brought, and still brings, a cost to the environment.

Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.

I don’t throw lavish parties or nothing like that – I just want a bed and a TV.

I spend a lot of time just, you know, with my girlfriend and my dog. And I mean, we don’t have a lot of furniture in our house, so it’s really simple. And we’re trying to build products for everyone in the world, right. And you don’t want to get isolated to do that.

Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons. For each American, it’s about 20 tons. For people in poor countries, it’s less than one ton. It’s an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And, somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero.

That government is best which governs least.

Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

Take the complications, rules, shoulds, musts, have tos, and so on out of your life. By uncomplicating your life and removing the trivial pursuits that occupy so much of it, you open a channel for the genius within you to emerge.

He has the most who is most content with the least.

By stopping flying, you don’t only reduce your own carbon footprint but also that sends a signal to other people around you that the climate crisis is a real thing and that helps push a political movement.

In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison – they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.

Elegance is refusal.

Most emissions aren’t caused by individuals, they’re caused by corporations and states.

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

In a meat-eating world, wearing leather for shoes and clothes and even handbags, the discussion of fur is childish.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

I’ve only wanted paper and beautiful colors. It was my dream, and it still is my dream. And books. They’re all I need, and the rest I can do without.

We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we’re so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We have to think quite carefully about using oil and its derivatives, because it’s not going to be around forever.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one’s self?

The simplification of anything is always sensational.

Material things are delightful, but they’re not important.

I resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution.

I personally have stopped flying. I have stopped eating meat and dairy.

I’m not very gifted for hairdos. I don’t like gel and all those products.

I don’t fly because of the enormous climate impact of aviation per person.

Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill.

If you can’t eat it, shoot it, or wear it, don’t bring it.