Alfred A. Montapert Quotes

The magic of living life for me is, and always has been, the magic of living on the land, not in the magic of money.

Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?

All of our technology is completely unnecessary to a happy life.

What I want to do with my filmmaking is help kids experience the truth and wisdom of nature no matter where they are, whether or not they have the opportunity to go to a national park.

Nature herself makes the wise man rich.

If it be true that a man is rich who wants nothing, a wise man is a very rich man.

My only desire is an intimate infusion with nature, and the only fate I wish is to have worked and lived in harmony with her laws.

A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.

A man in a cave or in a camp, a nomad, will die with no more estate than the wolf or the horse leaves.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.

Diogenes carried a bowl with him for years, but one day saw a man drinking from his cupped palm and declared, ‘I have been a fool, burdened all these years by the weight of a bowl when a perfectly good vessel lay at the end of my wrist.

He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.

Live below your means but within your needs.

If we have the khadi spirit in us, then we should surround ourselves with simplicity in every walk of life.

I love to write out of doors and sleep out of doors, too. If I sleep under the open sky it becomes part of the writing experience, part of my insulation from the world.

One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living."

And the lesson was this; sit in the sun, head down, within a prickly vine, in a flickery light, or open light, and the world will come to you. The sky will come in its time, bringing rain, and the earth will rise through you, from beneath, and make you rich and make you full.

High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring

I live like a monk: with one toothbrush, one cake of soap, and a pot of cream.

At the very simplest, I think as Van Gogh said and St Francis would have said, we must find nature. Just to be in the presence of nature your feelings and 'little seedlings' start to awake. So if we disassociate ourselves from God we cut nature out, too. More and more we turn nature into a commodity, into eco-tourism. But we must integrate it into the way people live every day.

The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.

Enjoy everything. Need nothing.

I don't know my telephone number or anything like that, but when I do have to make a call, I just pull my body over to the side and squat. I don't want to be one of those people who are on their phone all the time.

Happiness consists not in having much, but in wanting no more than you have.

Just as we need the courage to be happy, we also need the courage to live simply.