Duane Elgin Quotes

Living simply is not about living in poverty or self-inflicted deprivation. It's about living an examined life where one has determined what is truly important and enough … and then just let go of all the rest.

Satisfactions are fulfillment of the heart. Dissatisfactions are the rumblings of the mind.

To live sustainably, we must live efficiently - not misdirecting or squandering the earth's precious resources. To live efficiently, we must live peacefully for military expenditures represent an enormous diversion of resources from meeting basic human needs. To live peacefully, we must live with a reasonable degree of equity, or fairness, for it is unrealistic to think that, in a communications-rich world, a billion people will except living in absolute poverty while another billion live in conspicuous excess.

Exploring a transformational scenario is a demanding exercise in social imagination that requires compassion, persistence, and patience. This is difficult work.

Who are we as a species? What evolutionary journey are we on? Do we have the inner potentials to meet the demands of the outer world? Can we rise in our maturity and grow into a healing and healthy relationship with the Earth?

the universe as buzzing with invisible energy and aliveness, patiently growing a garden of cosmic scale. It suggests that we humans, as conscious life forms in this immensity, are very precious. We serve an important purpose for a universe growing conscious forms of life: Through us, the universe sees, knows, feels, and learns. We are learning how to live ever more consciously in a living universe. What matters most is not matter but what is invisible—the aliveness within ourselves, our relationships, and the world around us.

In some ways Duane Elgin’s Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich, published in 1981, was the first of these.