“He that is discontented in one place will seldom be happy in another.”

— Aesop 620 – 546 BCE
Hero of the oppressed and downtrodden
from Aesop's Fables, the Aesopica

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“where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you've spoiled what was pure and simple”

— Chuang Tzu 莊周 369 – 286 BCE
(Zhuangzi)

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“When sages govern great states, they think of them as small states and are frugal in the use of resources. When the people are many, sages think of them as few and are careful not to exhaust them.”

— Heshang Gong 河上公 202 – 157 BCE
(Ho-shang Kung or "Riverside Sage”)

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“They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea.”

— Horace 65 – 8 BCE

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“God’s Realm won’t come just because you’re watching for it, and neither can people say, ‘Here it is!’ or ‘There it is’, because God’s Realm is actually within you!”

— Jesus 3 BCE – 30 CE

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“Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water.”

— Jianzhi Sengcan 鑑智僧璨 529 – 606 CE
(Jiànzhì Sēngcàn)

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“They are satisfied with their food because they taste the Tao. They are pleased with their clothing because they are adorned with virtue. They are content with their homes because they are content wherever they are.”

— Chéng Xuanying 成玄英 631 – 655 CE
(Ch'eng Hsuan-ying)

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“The wise create enlightened vision with modesty and grace.”

— Lakshmincara ལཀྵྨཱིངྐ་རཱ།། 1 via Keith Dowman
(“The Princess of Crazy wisdom”)
from Masters of Mahamudra

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“Even with the strength of a large state, it is necessary to always make oneself humbly insignificant.”

— Wang Zhen 809 – 859 CE via Ralph D. Sawyer
from Daodejing Lunbing Yaoyishu, The Tao of War

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“The natural endowment of all beings is complete in itself. Poverty does not reduce it. Wealth does not enlarge it. But fools abandon this treasure to chase trash.”

— Wang Pang 1044 – 1076 CE via Red Pine
from Lao-tzu-chu

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“Humanity, take a good look at yourself. Inside, you’ve got heaven and earth, and all of creation. You’re a world—everything is hidden in you.”

— Hildegard of Bingen 1098 – 1179 CE

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“Everyday life is the way.”

— Mumon Ekai 無門慧開 1183 – 1260 CE
(Wumen Huikai)
Pioneering pathfinder to the Gateless Gate

from The Gateless Gate, 無門関, 無門關

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“If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?”

— Dōgen Zenji 道元禅師 1200 – 1253 CE

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“I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty… go where you will… if you do not find your soul, the world will be unreal… Go not elsewhere.”

— Kabīr कबीर 1399 – 1448 CE

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“The gods are just and of our pleasant devices make instruments to plague us.”

— William Shakespeare 1564 – 1616 CE
from King Lear

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“Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712 – 1778 CE

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“Getting out of danger requires that one believe it is dangerous – belief rules the mind… If there is truthfulness, then the mind develops.”

— Liu Yiming 刘一明 1734 – 1821 CE via Thomas Cleary
(Liu I-ming)
from Taoist I Ching, , Zhouyi chanzhen 周易闡真

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“Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night”

— William Blake 1757 – 1827 CE

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“Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will.”

— Novalis 1772 – 1831 CE

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“We dream of travels throughout the universe: is not the universe within us? We do not know the depths of our spirit.”

— Novalis 1772 – 1831 CE

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“You are my creator but I am your master; Obey!”

— Mary Shelley 1797 – 1851 CE
from Frankenstein

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“As with out colleges, so with a hundred ‘modern improvements’; there is an illusion about them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things.”

— Henry David Thoreau 1817 – 1862 CE
Father of environmentalism and America's first yogi
from Walden or Life in the Woods

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“Men have become the tools of their tools… have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.”

— Henry David Thoreau 1817 – 1862 CE
Father of environmentalism and America's first yogi
from Walden or Life in the Woods

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“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

— Mark Twain 1835 – 1910 CE
(Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
America’s most famous author

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“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”

— Elbert Hubbard 1856 – 1915 CE

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“Man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains. He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man.”

— G. I. Gurdjieff 1866 – 1949 CE

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“Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.”

— Willa Cather 1873 – 1948 CE
Modern day Lao Tzu

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“The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men…In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us.”

— G. K. Chesterton 1874 – 1936 CE

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“All of the great empires of the future will be empires of the mind.”

— Winston Churchill 1874 – 1965 CE

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“it is the tremendous experiment of becoming conscious, which nature has imposed on mankind, uniting the most diverse cultures in a common task.”

— Carl Jung 1875 – 1961 CE
Insightful shamanistic scientist

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“A new step in the genesis of mind… A new domain of psychical expansion… waiting for us beyond the line where empires are set up against other empires, in an interior totalisation of the world upon itself… a spirit of the earth.”

— Teilhard de Chardin 1881 – 1955 CE via Bernard Wall
from Phenomenon of Man

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“Modern man no longer knows what to do with the time and the potentialities he has unleashed. We groan under the burden of this wealth.”

— Teilhard de Chardin 1881 – 1955 CE via Bernard Wall
from Phenomenon of Man

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“In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.”

— Will (and Ariel) Durant 1885 – 1981 CE

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“all technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends... we repeatedly enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our purposes.”

— Will (and Ariel) Durant 1885 – 1981 CE
from Lessons of History

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“In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.”

— Will (and Ariel) Durant 1885 – 1981 CE

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“Progress in knowledge, science, comforts, and power is only progress in means; if there is no improvement in ends, purposes, or desires, progress is a delusion.”

— Will (and Ariel) Durant 1885 – 1981 CE

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“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr 1892 – 1971 CE

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“Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there.”

— Aldous Huxley 1894 – 1963 CE
from Island

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“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”

— Aldous Huxley 1894 – 1963 CE

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“Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.”

— Aldous Huxley 1894 – 1963 CE

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“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”

— Buckminster Fuller 1895 – 1983 CE

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“As long as we invent and progress in mechanical things and not in love, we shall not achieve happiness.”

— Jean Giono 1895 – 1970 CE

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“Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.”

— Erich Fromm 1900 – 1980 CE
One of the most powerful voices of his era promoting the true personal freedom beyond social, political, religious, and national belief systems

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“Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 1900 – 1944 CE

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“The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.”

— Erich Fromm 1900 – 1980 CE
One of the most powerful voices of his era promoting the true personal freedom beyond social, political, religious, and national belief systems

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“Even today, we are generally told that gigantic organizations are inescapably necessary; but when we look closely we can notice that as soon as great size has been created there is often a strenuous attempt to attain smallness within bigness.”

— E. F. Schumacher 1911 – 1977 CE
The “People's Economist”
from Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered

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“…the present consumer society is like a drug addict who, no matter how miserable he may feel, finds it extremely difficult to get off the hook.”

— E. F. Schumacher 1911 – 1977 CE
The “People's Economist”
from Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered

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“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

— Marshall McLuhan 1911 – 1980 CE

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“First we build the tools, then they build us.”

— Marshall McLuhan 1911 – 1980 CE

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“An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”

— E. F. Schumacher 1911 – 1977 CE
The “People's Economist”
from Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered

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“While you sit watching pictures on your color TV set, I stand gazing at ripples in a moonlit pond, thanking the gods for not interrupting with commercials.”

— John Blofeld 1913 – 1987 CE

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“We make a desert and call it progress.”

— Ursula Le Guin 1929 – 2018 CE
from Lavinia

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“We’re used, our lives shaped and controlled, by our machines, cars, planes, weaponry, bulldozers, computers. These Taoists don’t surrender their power to their creations.”

— Ursula Le Guin 1929 – 2018 CE

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“Where man goes, trees die; or, to paraphrase Tacitus, we make a desert and call it progress.”

— Ursula Le Guin 1929 – 2018 CE
from Lavinia

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“For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are… To ask is to break the spell.”

— Neil Postman 1931 – 2003 CE
from Amusing Ourselves to Death

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“We worry about robots and AI becoming human while the real concern is people becoming robotic.”

— Shan Dao 山道 1933 CE –

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“one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were somewhere else.”

— Wendell Berry 1934 CE –

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“We end up bombarded by all kinds of alternatives, and we are never able to relate with any of them properly.”

— Chögyam Trungpa 1939 – 1987 CE
from Illusion's Game

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“Gaviotas is not a community that can be replicated. What needs to be replicated is the Gaviotas way of thinking.”

— Paulo Lugari 1944 CE – via Alan Weisman

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“Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around but also… self-reproducing… They showed up and worked, generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson 1952 CE –
from 2312

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“Like an adult no longer interested in children’s games… you lose interest in all the trappings and beliefs that society builds up and tears down — political systems, science and technology, global economy, free society…”

— Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche རྫོང་གསར་ འཇམ་དབྱངས་ མཁྱེན་བརྩེ་ རིན་པོ་ཆེ། 1961 CE –
(Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche)
"Activity" incarnation of Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo
from What Makes You Not a Buddhist

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