Henry David Thoreau Quotes

It would be nice to live off the land and fix cars.

Mali exists mostly to itself. Few people go there. Few Malians leave. Most of Mali's 13 million people live, and seem to live quite happily, off the rice, corn and millet they grow and the long-horn cattle and goats they keep.

I was raised on farms by people who didn't have Wal-Mart. They had to make their own sleds, harnesses, clothing, etc.

I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.

I grow the vegetables my family eats. I grow enough, and we seldom buy from the market.

I've been trying for some time to develop a lifestyle that doesn't require my presence.

Natural life, lived naturally as it is lived in the countryside, has none of that progress which is the base of happiness. Men and women in rural communities can be compared to a spring that rises out of a rock and spreads in irregular ever-widening circles. But the general principle is static.

There's something great about the idea of working the land and living communally. That's healthy. That's good.

I've got a different life. I live up on a farm; I don't have anything to do with social media.

I grew up on a farm, and I think I would have come back and done something like that. It's an honest way of life, a conservative way of life, simple way of life.

Even in 'Khatron,' I used to wash my own clothes.

I have a very strict lifestyle. It's a vegetarian household and we grow our own produce.

My grandmother had a courtyard of animals, like goats and chickens. She made ricotta cheese, cooked with potatoes warm from the garden, grew everything from beans to wheat. It was simple, seasonal food, and we all ate what was produced 10 miles from where we lived. It was that way for centuries.

I'm fine with just a simple life.

I have a deep connection with Mahatma Gandhi, partly because my mother was a very, very staunch Gandhian and brought us up that way. When I was six years old, and all the girls were getting nylon dresses, I was very keen to get a nylon frock for my birthday. My mother said, “I can get it for you, but would you rather—through how you live and what you wear and what you eat—ensure that food goes into the hands of the weaver or ensure that profits go into the bank of an industrialist?” That became such a checkstone for everything in life.

Whatever the time or circumstances, the feeling that I am a peasant gives me a rare self-sufficiency. Indeed, the land is always there. I can go back to it at any time.

Life on a small farm might seem primitive, but by living such a life we become able to discover the Great Path. I believe that one who deeply respects his neighborhood and everyday world in which he lives will be shown the greatest of all worlds.

Someone who goes with a half a loaf of bread to a small place that fits like a nest around him, someone who wants no more, who is not himself longed for by anyone else. He is a letter to everyone. You open it. It says, Live.

We killed our own hogs, we killed our own beef, we raised our own vegetables, which Mama canned. We did live off the land.

He is always a slave who cannot live on little.

You cannot build nonviolence on a factory civilization, but it can be built on self-contained villages.

A human being needs only a small plot of ground on which to be happy, and even less to lie beneath.

The Californians are an idle, thriftless people, and can make nothing for themselves. The country abounds in grapes, yet they buy, at a great price, bad wine made in Boston.

I am open to the accusation that I see compost as an end it itself. But we do grow some real red damn tomatoes such as you can't get in the stores. And potatoes, beans, lettuce, collards, onions, squash, cauliflower, eggplant, carrots, peppers. Dirt in you own backyard, producing things you eat. Makes you wonder.

I want to retreat back to living off the land and just being in nature, experiencing life in the most pure, natural way possible.