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.

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

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

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.

Simple goes a long way.

Buy less. Choose well. Make it last. Quality, not quantity. Everybody’s buying far too many clothes.

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

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.

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

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

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

The simplification of anything is always sensational.

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don’t actually improve their lives.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Simplify, simplify.

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

The more you know the less you need to say.

I’m not saying that people should stop flying. I’m just saying it needs to be easier to be climate neutral.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

Elegance is refusal.

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.

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

A place for everything, everything in its place.

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.

Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that’s stripped down.

The last suit that you wear, you don’t need any pockets.

It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.

In just a few hundred years, we will have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells if we want to continue to grow our energy usage.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

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

Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn’t surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used. It pollutes the air and water of this very fragile and interconnected planet.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

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.

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

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.

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

I don’t care about money.

Personally, I don’t wear fur.

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

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

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

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.

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

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

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

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

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.