Creating a Sustainable Future Quotes


Inspirational Quotes Offering Guidance for Restoring Our Planet


Ingredients for Success

The question is...whether we shall, by whatever means, succeed in reconstituting the natural world as the true terrain of politics, rehabilitating the personal experience of human beings as the initial measure of things, placing morality above politics and responsibility above our desires, in making human community meaningful, in returning content to human speech, in reconstituting, as the focus of all social action, the autonomous, integral, and dignified human "I,"...  Vaclav Havel, Open Letters


First: Self-Transformation

I change myself, I change the world.

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.  So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people.  That comes afterward, when you've worked on your own corner.  Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop

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You can never have an impact on society if you have not changed yourself.  Nelson Mandela

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I change myself, I change the world.  Gloria Anzuldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

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If we take a survey of the greatest actions…in the world…we shall find the authors of them all to have been persons whose Brains had been shaken out of their natural position. John Adams


Perfecting Our Hearts

If you have love you will do all things well.

If you have love you will do all things well.  Thomas Merton

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When the heart is flooded with love there is no room in it for fear, for doubt, for hesitation.  Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

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With a stout heart, a mouse can lift an elephant.  Tibetan proverb, A World Treasury of Folk Wisdom


Centering Ourselves

Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to others.

Someone who does not draw strength from himself and who is incapable of finding the meaning of his life within himself will...seek the map to his own orientation somewhere outside himself--in some ideology, organization, or society, and then, however active he may appear to be, he is merely waiting, depending.  He waits to see what others will do, or what roles they will assign to him, and he depends on them--and if they don't do anything or if they botch things, he succumbs to disillusion, despair, and ultimately, resignation.  Vaclav Havel, Open Letters

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We must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic.  Rollo May, The Courage to Create

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Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men.  Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself


Finding Our Own Truth

If we live truly, we shall see truly.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe…till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is...  Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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If we live truly, we shall see truly.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance", Essays: First Series

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I am a very curious person; I'll always ask: is this thing true, is it not true? And I use my own means to investigate and come to my conclusion. Wole Soyinka

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It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.  Antoine de Saint-Exupery


Relying on Ourselves

Don't wait for anyone to deputize you or authorize you or empower you.  You have to just start out with yourself...and put one foot in front of the other.

Past the seeker as he prayed came the crippled and the beggar and the beaten. And seeing them...he cried, "Great God, how is it that a loving creator can see such things and yet do nothing about them?"...God said, "I did do something. I made you."  Sufi Teaching

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[We] are the makers of our own state and…individuals who realize the fact need not, ought not, to wait for collective action.  Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi

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No matter who or where we are, or what our capabilities, we are called to do the best we can. Wangari Maathai

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It is in your hands to create a better world for all who live in it. Nelson Mandela

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Don't wait for anyone to deputize you or authorize you or empower you.  You have to just start out with yourself...and put one foot in front of the other.  Hazel Henderson, Visionaries by Utne Reader


Believing in Ourselves

It's not too late at all.  You just don't yet know what you are capable of.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us. Ralph Waldo Emerson

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It's not too late at all.  You just don't yet know what you are capable of.  Mahatma Gandhi

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Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.  Marianne Williamson

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Everything that man can imagine, he is capable of creating. Thomas Sankara


Finding the Right State of Mind

That fire of clear mind is in everyone, and to remove any obscuration of its clarity is the duty of all people in this time, that each one may remember and find our way again to the source of our being.

Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation. Rabindranath Tagore

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Many of us worry about the situation of the world . . . We need to remain calm, to see clearly.  Meditation is a means to be aware, and to try to help.  Thich Nhat Hanh, Visionaries by Utne Reader

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That fire of clear mind is in everyone, and to remove any obscuration of its clarity is the duty of all people in this time, that each one may remember and find our way again to the source of our being. Dhyani Ywahoo

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He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality. Anwar Sadat

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It is not where you start but how high you aim that matters for success. Nelson Mandela

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The size of your dreams must always exceed your current capacity to achieve them. If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

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You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you. Vandana Shiva


Finding the Right Speech

Before the tongue can speak, it must have lost the power to wound.

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing in the tempting place.  Benjamin Franklin 

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Don't raise your voice, improve your argument. Desmond Tutu

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Before the tongue can speak, it must have lost the power to wound.  Peace Pilgrim, Peace Pilgrim

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Whoever wants his judgment to be believed, should express it coolly and dispassionately; for all vehemence springs from the will.  And so the judgment might be attributed to the will and not to knowledge, which by its nature is cold.  Arthur Schopenhauer

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When I'm getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say--and two-thirds thinking about him and what he is going to say.  Abraham Lincoln


Finding the Right Action

Can you remain unmoving    
till the right action arises by itself?

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root…  Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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I am in favor of [actions] that have authenticity, roots, originality, verve, balance, taste, communicativeness, challenge, relevance to their time--in short, things that make sense.  Vaclav Havel, Open Letters

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Through our reactions we create delusions.  Without reactions the world becomes clear.  Buddha

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Do you have the patience to wait    
till your mud settles and the water is clear?    
Can you remain unmoving    
till the right action arises by itself?  Lao-Tzu


Making "Little" Efforts

I go to the root of the problem and then work around it. It's building brick by brick.

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped.  Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope; and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.  Robert F. Kennedy, Make Gentle the Life of This World, The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy

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Every one of us can make a contribution. And quite often we are looking for the big things and forget that, wherever we are, we can make a contribution. Sometimes I tell myself, I may only be planting a tree here, but just imagine what's happening if there are billions of people out there doing something. Just imagine the power of what we can do. Wangari Maathai

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I avoid grandiose plans.  I start with a small piece that I can do.  I go to the root of the problem and then work around it.  It's building brick by brick.  Muhammad Yunus, Visionaries by Utne Reader

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All big things are made up of trifles.  My entire life has been built on trifles.  Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi

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A small act is worth a million thoughts. Ai Weiwei

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You can start changing our world for the better daily, no matter how small the action. Nelson Mandela

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Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world. Desmond Tutu

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Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things…I am tempted to think…there are no little things.  Bruce Barton


Committing Fully

the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no person could have dreamt would have come their way. 

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.  W. H. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition

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Concentration is inspiration.  You must be completely overtaken by your work and your subject.  Only then do all your influences and experience come up to the surface.  Cesar Chavez

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We are not lacking in the dynamic forces needed to create the future.  We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension.  Thomas Berry, The Great Work


Staying Detached

Keep your hands open, and all the sands of the desert can pass through them.  Close them, and all you can feel is a bit of grit.

We must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong.  People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one...is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt.  Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.  Rollo May, The Courage to Create

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You must stick to your conviction, but be ready to abandon your assumptions.  Denis Waitley

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Not only has one to do one's best, one must, while doing one's best, remain detached from whatever one is trying to achieve.  Janwillem Van De Wetering

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Keep your hands open, and all the sands of the desert can pass through them.  Close them, and all you can feel is a bit of grit.  Taisen Deshimaru


Perservering

If a single person plants themselves indomitably on their instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to them.

None of us can predict when the causes we support will capture the public imagination, and our once-lonely quests become popular crusades.  Paul Rogat Loeb, Soul of a Citizen

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Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.  Calvin Coolidge

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Every good movement passes through five stages, indifference, ridicule, abuse, repression, and respect.  Mahatma Gandhi, All Men are Brothers, Autobiographical Reflections

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[When you get into a] tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.  Harriet Beecher Stowe

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If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.  Ralph Waldo Emerson


Building Courage

Because of deep love, one is courageous.

Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.  John Quincy Adams

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You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.  Eleanor Roosevelt

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Because of deep love, one is courageous.  Lao-tzu

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I want us all to face our fears and stop behaving like our goal in life is to merely survive.  "Surviving" is for wimps and game show contestants stranded in the jungle or on a desert island.  You are not stranded.  You own the store....You deserve better.  Michael Moore, Stupid White Men

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We have to give our opinion, we have to say something, or we are a part of it. As an artist I am forced to say something. Ai Weiwei

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As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.  Nelson Mandela


Holding on to Hope

But we have only begun to love the earth.
We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life.
How could we tire of hope?--so much is in bud.

Oh! Much may be done by defying   
The ghosts of Despair and Dismay;  
And much more may be gained by relying   
On "Where there's a will there's a way."  Eliza Cook

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Honest hope has an edge.  It's messy.  It requires that we let go of all pat answers, all preconceived formulas, all confidence that our sailing will be smooth.  It's not a resting point.  Honest hope is movement.  Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe, Hope's Edge

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But we have only begun to love the earth.
We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life.
How could we tire of hope?--so much is in bud. Denise Levertov, "Candles in Babylon"

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Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness. Desmond Tutu

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It always seems impossible until it's done. Nelson Mandela

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Those who are animated by hope can perform what would seem impossibilities to those who are under the depressing influence of fear.  Maria Edgeworth


Believing in a Brighter Future

Right now over 70 percent of the world population is convinced that something serious has to be done about the dangers facing the planet. ...Most of humanity wants to know how to make the change.  It's one of those tipping-point times where things can change unbelievably fast.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.  Richard Bach

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I find a powerful spur to faith in considering man's existence as an evolutional day of twelve hours.  It startles me--the vivid realization that Babylon and Egypt began to do mighty works but half an hour ago and that the world, for the most part, has been somewhat civilized for only a few minutes.  Modern science entered during the last minute ticked off by the cosmic timepiece.  Such a fancy makes possible a truer picture of man, still pathetically young, simple, stammering, bewildered by the swift accumulation of spiritual and mechanical forces he has not yet learned to control.  Helen Keller, Let Us Have Faith

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Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark. Rabindranath Tagore

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Right now over 70 percent of the world population is convinced that something serious has to be done about the dangers facing the planet. ...Most of humanity wants to know how to make the change.  It's one of those tipping-point times where things can change unbelievably fast... Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, The Cultural Creatives

 

Instruments for Change

The breakage and agony rending us today will be our salvation if they drive us by new routes to meet it. . . . As of old we must be our own seers, musicians and explorers, and to an extent vaster than ever before.  This is the purpose to which we are being summoned to harness our world-body!...Heroic responses in ideals and in conduct are a choice of regal dignity in the presence of a new earth and Heaven.  Helen Keller, Let Us Have Faith


Providing a Strong Vision

When people can see a vision and simultaneously recognize what can be done step by step in a concrete way to achieve it, they will begin to feel encouragement and enthusiasm instead of fright.

If we cannot envision the world we would like to live in, we cannot work towards its creation.  If we cannot place ourselves in it in our imagination, we will not believe it is possible.  Chellis Glendinning, My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization

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When people can see a vision and simultaneously recognize what can be done step by step in a concrete way to achieve it, they will begin to feel encouragement and enthusiasm instead of fright.  Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be?

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The arrival of the new millennium provides an ideal opportunity to implement a positive vision for the future - one which draws together the peoples and nations of the world behind a common goal. Restoring the Earth Project


Working Through Love

There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer

Where there is great love there are always miracles.  Willa Cather

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There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer…It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble; how hopeless the outlook; how muddled the tangle; how great the mistake.  A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all.  Emmet Fox, The Sermon on the Mount

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He who wants to do good, knocks at the gate;
He who loves, finds the door open. Rabindranath Tagore

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The conclusion is always the same: Love is the most powerful and still the most unknown energy of the world. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation. Rabindranath Tagore


Speaking Only Truth

truthful movements spontaneously attract to themselves all manner of pure and disinterested help.

[All] truthful movements spontaneously attract to themselves all manner of pure and disinterested help.  Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi

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Reformers who are always compromising, have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. …Say what you have to say, not what you ought.  Any truth is better than make-believe.  Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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On the other end of the spectrum there is waiting of another kind: that is, patience.  For us this waiting was based on the knowledge that it made sense on principle to resist by speaking the truth simply because it was the right thing to do...that repeating this defiant truth made sense in itself, regardless of whether it was ever appreciated, or victorious, or repressed for the hundredth time.  At the very least, it meant that someone was not supporting the government of lies.  It also, of course, grew out of faith--but this is of secondary importance--that a seed once sown would one day take root and send forth a shoot.  Vaclav Havel, The Art of the Impossible

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Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion. Wole Soyinka

Lighting the Darkness

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it

We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future.  John F. Kennedy

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You have much more power when you are working for the right thing than when you are working against the wrong thing.  And, of course, if the right thing is established wrong things will fade away of their own accord.  Peace Pilgrim, Peace Pilgrim

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There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.  Edith Wharton

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In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now. Wangari Maathai

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Salvation lies in an energetic march onward towards a brighter and clearer future. Emma Goldman

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Let me light my lamp", says the star, "And never debate if it will help to remove the darkness." Rabindranath Tagore


Looking to Nature for Guidance

Look!  Look!  Look deep into nature and you will understand everything.

We can learn whatever we need in nature because we are part of nature.  Human beings are part of Creation.  We live by the same laws as all of nature.  Anne Wilson Schaef

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Learn from the birds what food the thickets yield;
Learn from the beasts the physic of the field;
The arts of building from the bee receive;
Learn of the mole to plow, the worm to weave.  Alexander Pope

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Whenever I have found myself stuck in the ways I relate to things, I return to nature. It is my principal teacher, and I try to open my whole being to what it has to say.  Wynn Bullock 

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Trust one who has tried it, you will find more in woods than in books; trees and stones will teach you what you can never learn from masters.  Saint Bernard de Clairvaux

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One should pay attention to even the smallest crawling creature for these too may have a valuable lesson to teach us.  Black Elk

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Look!  Look!  Look deep into nature and you will understand everything.  Albert Einstein


Offering Attractive Virtues

Lasting change happens when people see for themselves that a different way of life is more fulfilling than their present one.

Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.  Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics

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[Pleasure is what suggested] which behaviors, emotions, social patterns and patterns of taste served us well during our evolutionary history.  They were experienced as pleasures and encoded into our formative genetic codes . . . deep in the past, from about 100,000 years ago and beyond.  Lionel Tiger

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Lasting change happens when people see for themselves that a different way of life is more fulfilling than their present one.  Eknath Easwaran, The Compassionate Universe

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The prophets preach . . . that pleasure, not will-power and coercion, is how you most deeply transform people.  Matthew Fox


Molding Public Opinion

Opinion is the great, indeed the only coordinating force in our system.

Opinion is the great, indeed the only coordinating force in our system.  Woodrow Wilson

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Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods…but no opinion.   Hannah Arendt

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Those who wish to change the world for the better should not begin by vilifying the public they seek to persuade, or by confronting it with a task that appears impossible.  Theodore Roszak, Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind

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You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it.  That doesn't mean you do nothing, but it means that you do the things that need to be done according to priority.  Eleanor Roosevelt, On My Own


Educating the Public

Give me knowledge, so I may have kindness for all. 

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.  Nelson Mandela

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Give me knowledge, so I may have kindness for all.  Native American (Plains) Proverb

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In the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught. Baba Dioum

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You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they must protect them. Wangari Maathai

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Do not try to...[teach] a great many things.  Awaken people's curiosity.  It is enough to open minds; do not overload them.  Put there just a spark.  If there is some good inflammable stuff, it will surely set fire.  Anatole France


Educating Through Experience

Experience isn't the best teacher, it's the only teacher.

The only source of knowledge is experience.  Albert Einstein

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Experience isn't the best teacher, it's the only teacher.  Jeremy Wolff

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Tell me, I'll forget.  Show me, I may remember.  But involve me and I'll understand.  Chinese Proverb

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Helping people to experience themselves as living bodies on a living earth . . . is necessary in achieving any solution to the problems we all face . . . Only with the bodily experience of power and compassion will people have the courage and the desire and the ability to undertake what must be done to heal the planet.  Paul Linden


Waking the Public to Our State of Crisis

In times of danger large groups rise to the highest pitch of enthusiasm, courage and sacrifice

Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis -- once that crisis can be recognized and understood.  Norman Cousins

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In times of danger large groups rise to the highest pitch of enthusiasm, courage and sacrifice . . . Mankind will be refashioned and history rewritten when this law is understood and obeyed.  Helen Keller, Let Us Have Faith

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The power of an aroused public is unbeatable.  Dr. Helen Caldicott

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When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters.  One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.  John F. Kennedy, 1959 Speech


Teaching by Doing

Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others; it is the only means.

Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others; it is the only means.  Albert Einstein 

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What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say. Ralph Waldo Emerson

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A woman once came to Mahatma Gandhi with her little boy.  She asked, "Mahatma-ji, tell my little boy to stop eating sugar."       
"Come back in three days," said Gandhi.    
In three days the woman and the little boy returned and Mahatma Gandhi said to the little boy, "Stop eating sugar."    
The woman asked, "Why was it necessary for us to return only after three days for you to tell my little boy that?"    
The Mahatma replied: "Three days ago I had not stopped eating sugar."

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A message prepared in the mind reaches a mind; a message prepared in a life reaches a life.  Bill Gothard


Sharing Our Ideas

man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Let me exhort everyone to do their utmost to think outside and beyond our present circle of ideas.  For every idea gained is a hundred years of slavery remitted.  Richard Jefferies

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Talk and write in a way that encourages the mutual exchange of ideas and acts like a midwife to people birthing their own ideas.  Grace Lee Boggs

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Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.  Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.  George Lois


Expression Through Words

Look in thy heart, and write. those who write to themselves write to an eternal public. 

It is sufficient that people should understand that what is enunciated to them as public opinion, and maintained by such complex, energetic, and artificial means, is not public opinion, but only the lifeless outcome of what was once public opinion; and, what is more important, it is sufficient that they should have faith in themselves, that they should believe that what they are conscious of in the depths of their souls, what in every one is pressing for expression, and is only not expressed because it contradicts the public opinion supposed to exist, is the power which transforms the world, and to express which is the mission of mankind...  Leo Tolstoy

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Fools multiply when wise men are silent. Nelson Mandela

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Accept your genius and say what you think. Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes. Desmond Tutu

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Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do.  I don't know why people shouldn't write poetry.  That's brave.  Robert Frost

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The effect of any writing on the public mind is mathematically measurable by its depth of thought…If it awaken you to think, if it lift you from your feet with a great voice of eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent, over the minds of men; if the pages instruct you not, they will die like flies in the hour.  The way to speak and write what shall not go out of fashion is, to speak and write sincerely.  The argument which has not power to reach my own practice, I may well doubt, will fail to reach yours.  But take Sidney's maxim:--"Look in thy heart, and write."  He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.  Ralph Waldo Emerson


Expression Through Art

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

Artistic originality is a culture's vital wellspring of renewal.  Lit from within by a unique and transforming vision, deeply original new music, poetry, theater, film and visual art reimagine life from the inside out.  New forms and new expression offer new ways of understanding our world and ourselves, of envisioning a future.  Steven Winn

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All art speaks in signs and symbols.  No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through.  No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.  Albert Schweitzer, Reverence for Life

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Where words fail, music speaks.  Hans Andersen

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I think art certainly is the vehicle for us to develop any new ideas, to be creative, to extend our imagination, to change the current conditions. Ai Weiwei

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[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers.  He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.  Gustave Flaubert

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The artist…is the voice of the people.  Alice Walker, Voices of the Dream

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Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body.  Martha Graham

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I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.  Diane Arbus


Telling Stories

The one who tells the stories rules the world.

As Joanna Macy reminds us, "Information by itself can increase resistance [to engagement], deepening the sense of apathy and powerlessness."  Stories about particular individuals and specific situations usually have the opposite effect.  By giving unwieldy problems a human face, they also bring them down to a human--and thus manageable--scale.  Paul Rogat Loeb, Soul of a Citizen

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Toward the end of Crow and Weasel, Barry Lopez's luminous fable of a quest to an unknown land, a wise old female Badger explains that telling true stories of where you've been and what you've seen is how people care for each other.  "Sometimes," Badger says, "a person needs a story more than food to stay alive."  We think we are in a time like that now, as we face the tipping point where one civilization is ending and the new one is not yet in sight.  Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, The Cultural Creatives

sustainability quotes

The one who tells the stories rules the world.  Native American (Hopi) Proverb


Using Butterfly Power

For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.

Chaos Theory's "butterfly effect" states that a butterfly flapping it's wings in Asia may cause a hurricane halfway around the world.

sustainability quotes

[Chaos theory] says that complex and chaotic systems -- which means most of the systems we encounter in nature and in society -- cannot accurately be predicted or exclusively controlled.  Neither can rigid systems be easily budged.  However, there's a loophole.  What if we acted through the myriad tiny feedback loops that hold a society together?  Chaos tells us that each one of us has an unrecognized but enormous influence on these loops.  Chaos suggests that although we may not have power of the controller in the traditional sense, we all possess the "butterfly power" of subtle influence.  John Briggs and F. David Peat, Seven Life Lessons of Chaos

sustainability quotes

For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.  Henry David Thoreau

sustainability quotes

Individuals [find] ways to engage in authentic individual creativity - "living in truth" - opening ourselves up to uncertainty, discovering the edge between our individuality and the universal, and acting from that discovery.  In our authentic realization of the truth of the moment lies our ability to deeply, if humbly, influence even the rigid systems built on automatism and empty phrases.  John Briggs and F. David Peat, Seven Life Lessons of Chaos

sustainability quotes

None of us knows what he accomplishes and what he gives to humanity.  That is hidden from us, and should remain so.  Sometimes we are allowed to see just a little of it, so we will not be discouraged.  The effects of energy are mysterious in all realms.  Albert Schweitzer, The Teaching of Reverence for Life


Restoring the Earth

I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.

The very process of the restoring the land to health is the process through which we become attuned to Nature and, through Nature, with ourselves.  Chris Maser, Forest Primeval

sustainability quotes

Adopting the bold stance involved in restoration work can catalyze a different kind of transformation.  By becoming active partners in regenerating the health of their localities--and, in a less dramatic way, of the Earth as a whole--people start to reverse the soul-numbing patterns of exploiting and abusing the source of so many life-sustaining gifts.  They also begin to release the often-repressed, but nonetheless crippling, emotions--guilt and shame, grief and despair, loneliness and powerlessness--associated with going along with the relentless machinery of corporate consumer culture.  Elan Shapiro

sustainability quotes

I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.  Barry Lopez, Helping Nature Heal

sustainability quotes

You can make a lot of speeches, but the real thing is when you dig a hole, plant a tree, give it water, and make it survive. That's what makes the difference. Wangari Maathai

sustainability quotes

There can be no purpose more enspiriting than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us.  Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life


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