John Lane > Quotes

“The industrialist was horrified to find the fisherman lying beside his boat, smoking a pipe. -  Why aren’t you fishing?, said the industrialist. -  Because I have caught enough fish for the day. -  Why don’t you catch some more? -  What would I do with them? -  Earn more money. Then you could have a motor fixed to your boat and go into deeper waters and catch more fish. That would bring you money to buy nylon nets, so more fish, more money. Soon you would have enough to buy two boats even a fleet of boats. Then you could be rich like me. - What would I do then? -  Then you could sit back and enjoy life. -  What do you think I’m doing now?”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“It is not things in themselves that trouble us, but our opinion of things,” he observed.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“It is also to choose to live more mindfully. It is to have direct and wholehearted participation in life: the taste and touch of actual things; the experience of the moment; the delight inherent in creative doing. Lose the possibilities of such experiences and a sense of boredom can begin its subtle but insidious invasion of the human heart. It is then that we most feel the need to fill the vacuum with a consoling substitute: another dress, another computer game or holiday. It is not acquisitiveness but boredom which can lead to regular and compulsory shopping — ‘ retail therapy’ — as a relief from the lacuna of an unfulfilled life. My experience tells me that the”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“Do not let the possibilities of laughter pass you by. Become lighter hearted; let go of too serious a vein. Laughter costs nothing, and can make others as well as yourself feel relaxed, feel companionable, feel good. To feel good is of more value than a room full of expensive possessions. “The more we lose the power to live,” writes Ivan Illich, “the greater we depend upon the goods we acquire.” The power to live exuberantly is inherent in a light-hearted touch which doesn’t take everything, however serious, too seriously.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“Originating in a system of mass production which generates vast quantities of products which need to be sold, it is the marketeers’ ambition to make us feel dissatisfied with what we already possess, to make us feel that we’d be happier, or more attractive, if we went out to purchase one or more of their products. It is, of course, a message that we can with some difficulty always choose to ignore. But even if we do so, we should still be careful to watch our step. For it is one thing to reject the sirencall of a particular manufacturer, but another to avoid the corrosive blandishments of an entire culture hell-bent on retailing everything under the sun. That”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“book Wild Hunger: The Primal Roots of Modern Addiction,16 the rejection of beauty, one of the ageless sources of regeneration, is at the root of much of the addiction which characterizes modern society. The wiser person seeks beauty in all things. He or she seeks to live a life that nourishes the soul, and “the depth of interiority and quality in which it flourishes”, as Thomas Moore writes. He or she discovers epiphanies in the contemplation of timeless realities, and seeks to move through the deep imagination, the royal road to the sacred.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“Those with a fully developed sense of being alive and engaged in a lifelong task of collaboration with other human beings, are those who are most likely to be living an unfettered life, a simple life, and one in which there is time for people. Those who are harried and preoccupied by work, acquisition and the quest for success, are those most likely to have sacrificed family and friends.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“An occupation offered as a service is generally more fulfilling than one done solely for cash.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“Walden or Life in the Woods (1854), an account of his life at the Pond, is a classic of simple living. “Life! who know what it is, what it does?,” he asked himself on the Sunday after he moved in. The book is, as it were, the answer, and one that has helped popularize a simple-living aesthetic throughout the Western world.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“In a shipwreck one of the passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold on it, with which he was afterwards found at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking — had he the gold? Or had the gold him”? JOHN RUSKIN”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“what provides us with a permanent sense of well-being, and what gives only transitory pleasure.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“The psychologist Erich Fromm has something to say on this subject. “The average man today,” he writes, “may have a good deal of fun and pleasure, but in spite of this he is fundamentally depressed. Perhaps it clarifies the issue if instead of using the word ‘depressed’ we use the word ‘bored’. Actually there is little difference between the two, except a difference in degree, because boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers and the sense of un-aliveness. Among the evils of life, there are few which are as painful as boredom, and consequently every attempt is made to avoid it.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“They teach that an over-complicated, over-stimulated life and too much haste congest the day, distract attention, dissipate energies and weaken our ability to find space for inner peace.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“This reaction can in its turn determine the next stage in the karmic cycle of events — what we decide to do, and the spirit in which we do it. Life, then, is to a large extent in our own hands. One of the Confucian ideals is that “the archer, when he misses the bullseye, turns and seeks the cause of the error in himself.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“Work that fails to bring life and livelihood together is out of gear.9 And if it is out of gear for many today, does it always have to be”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“You were born with a singular talent and a singular destiny, a singular character and a singular vocation. Discover it! Be it! or become it! Nothing else — not even the wealth of the richest man in Britain, Hans Rausing, who owned £5.6 billion in 2000 — will give you as much contentment as the knowledge that you are following the path of your character.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind,”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“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.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“The great legacy of the past is its slowness, its patience, its human scale, its measured human pace and undisturbed quietness. These remain the sanest objectives of anyone seeking to simplify.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“The more one has the more one wants. There is no limit to the expansion of sensory desires . . . PITIRIM SOROKIN12”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“If you have somehow failed to figure out your special gift, or maybe failed to break through the cultural barriers that prevent its realization, have no fear. Have the courage of those who have already done so, and take your life in your hands.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“The Great Work, the American ecologist Thomas Berry argues that it is our generation —”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“largely took for granted is now continuously undermined by a culture committed to mass marketing, mass consumption and mass media.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“For youth culture, with its emphasis on clothes and love of fashion, music, computers and sport, is not about acquisition but culture as commodity: what you are is defined by what you wear, and apparel becomes a species of ideology.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“The idea that money is a primary cause of wellbeing distorts values, intentions and actions; at the same”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“Money, then, is a screen on to which we project our unconscious emotional life: our primal anxieties about future deprivation, cold and dearth, our miserliness and desire for power, as well as the goodness in our natures.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“What we need and what we want are clearly not one and the same thing.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“In its place they urge consideration of an alternative path: a mindful, unhurried, intentional and appreciative approach to living.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused. MICHAEL CRICHTON”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

“It is better to have fewer wants than to have larger resources.”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society