Helen Nearing > Quotes

“The value of doing something does not lie in the ease or difficulty, the probability or improbability of its achievement, but in the vision, the plan, the determination and the perseverance, the effort and the struggle which go into the project. Life is enriched by aspiration and effort, rather than by acquisition and accumulation.”
― Helen Nearing, The Good Life: Helen and Scott Nearing's Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living

“When you are faced with food that has been sterilized, fumigated, hydrogenated, hydrolyzed, homogenized, colored, bleached, puffed, exploded, defatted, degermed, texturized, or if you don’t know what has been done to it, the safest rule is not to eat it.”
― Helen Nearing, Simple Food for the Good Life: Random Acts of Cooking and Pithy Quotations

“There are several ways to perform almost any act - an efficient, workable, artistic way and a careless, indifferent, sloppy way. Care and artistry are worth the trouble. They can be a satisfaction to the practitioner and a joy to all beholders.”
― Helen Nearing, The Good Life: Helen and Scott Nearing's Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living

“The store customer, who comes home with a package under his arm has learned nothing, except that a ten dollar bill is a source of power in the market place. The man or woman who has converted material into needed products via tools and skills has matured in the process.”
― Helen Nearing, The Good Life: Helen and Scott Nearing's Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living

“The business of procuring the necessities of life has been shifted from the wood lot, the garden, the kitchen and the family to the factory and the large-scale enterprise. In our case, we moved our center back to the land.”
― Helen Nearing, The Good Life: Helen and Scott Nearing's Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living

“The simpler the food, the better, I think; the rawer, the better; the fewer mixtures, the better. This way of eating involves less preparation, less cooking, easier digestion, more food value, better health, and more money saved.”
― Helen Nearing, Simple Food for the Good Life: Random Acts of Cooking and Pithy Quotations

“In Maie get a weede hooke, a crotch and a glove,
And weed out such weedes as the corne doth not love.
Slack never thy weeding, for dearth nor for cheape,
The corne shall reward it er ever ye reape.

[Thomas Tusser, ‘Five hundred points of husbandry: directing what corn, grass, is proper to be sown: what trees to be planted: how land is to be improved: with with whatever is fit to be done for the benefit of the farmer in every month of the year’ (1557).]”
― Helen Nearing, Wise Words for the Good Life