The Abundance of Less Quotes

“If you have time, a lot of things are enjoyable. Making this type of woodblock, or collecting the wood for the fire, or even cleaning things - it's all enjoyable and satisfying if you give yourself time - Nakamura.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“If you are buying a lot of books, you think, Ah, hmm, this book says this thing, and Oh, huh, this other book says the other thing. And now maybe I’ll buy this one and that one. And you think about a lot of mixed-up things. But to write a book, it’s something that happens inside your own head: you think and think and think, for a long, long time. And at the end you bring out a book. When you write a book, it is a self-to-self discussion. Isn’t it? It is! So in that meaning, you don’t need another person to discuss it with.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“If you join some kind of association, your own true way of thinking gets shackled. You do things just to give yourself that feeling of ease.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“if you stay in your imagination all the time, soon your dream doesn’t work anymore because dreams need reality as nutrients. Without nutrients, animals and plants die, and if the nourishment for your dreams runs out, the world of the dream gets smaller and smaller and eventually dies. So you need both: dream and reality, imagination and actuality. Thus you have to talk to all kinds of people, look at many kinds of plants, eat all kinds of things to make your imagination new, to keep that interior world fresh. Then your own world can expand and can grow.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“If you start to accumulate things, you can’t travel, so I lived without. I figured I could live a whole life without anything,”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“Doing nothing all day—it’s difficult at first. Being busy is a habit, and a hard one to break.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“We exist in the midst of eternity all the time.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“Don’t imitate our life. Please learn from our life. Build up your own new life. Just be as much like yourself as you can be.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“Although Yamashita and Amemiya grow and prepare their own food—both of which definitely take a lot of time—they seem to be suffused in timelessness, in an endless present.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“One haiku hints at both the joys and sadness of a solitary monk on a pilgrimage in the winter: Even in my empty begging bowl A piece of hail.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“Whatever he did, he did it, he says, isshou-kenmei, a word that translates loosely as “with all your heart,” but a more literal translation would be “hanging your whole life on it.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“It is like what Voltaire said, “Il faut cultiver son jardin”: You must cultivate your own garden.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“How funny it is that one of the fundamental definitions of being “modern” is the ability to avoid physical labor, when it might be that very thing that could provide us with such depth of connection to ourselves and to the world.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“People keep finding themselves in an unforgiving matrix of overwork, stress, and unwilling complicity in the destruction of the earth.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“Long, long ago,” Nakamura says, “there were very few choices for most people in the world. The majority couldn’t even think of choosing what kind of life they would live. Then over the past two hundred years, more and more people had one, or two, or three options open up to them.” Nakamura makes a branching movement with his hands, like a tree. “But now, there are thousands and thousands of choices; it’s like there are so many branches that people have a hard time deciding on anything.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“In the world system of increasingly discrete labor, in which each person contributes an ever smaller part to an ever vaster manufacturing of so-called “goods,” the act of disentangling oneself from the whole might, in hindsight, appear quite radical. But for the person concerned, in that moment, exiting the system feels like the only available path.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“In almost everything in his life, he’s relentlessly pursuing the question of how the common people are deceived, and constantly thinking of creative and humorous ways to make them realize it.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“If I’m busy, I might overlook something magnificent and splendid like a rare mushroom in the forest … and who knows when I might see such an amazing thing again?”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“What were the things that really challenged me, made me wake up to my way of thinking that presupposed an industrialized system? In five words. Gentle. Small. Humble. Slow. Simple.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“People are alive by means of the circulation of the spirit and the movement of the cosmos. Without those we couldn’t even be alive. And the systems of our world—academics, science, education, medicine, culture, and civilization—all are manifestations of this spirit but also of the current myths or cosmology that we are living. And these are what we must go beyond.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

“Even one second ahead of you is darkness.”
― Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan