Vicki Robin Quotes

“Life is too precious to be a spectator sport. We are no longer merely fans, rooting for the winning team. We are the team. We are the grown-ups. Whatever you believe is true, now is the time to give your respectful, inquisitive, and compassionate self to it.”

“Everything in the community of life gives back 100 percent – except the humans.”

“A 2015 US Federal Reserve Board report found that 47 percent of Americans would have to borrow money or sell something to cover a $400 emergency expense.”

“Along with racism and sexism, our society has a form of caste system based on what you do for money. We call that jobism, and it pervades our interactions with one another on the job, in social settings and even at home. Why else would we consider housewives second-class citizens? Or teachers lower status than doctors even though their desk-side manner with struggling students is far better than many doctors’ bedside manner with the ill and dying?”

“As civilized and advanced as we may have become, we still depend on breathable air, potable water, and fertile soil for our daily existence.”

“As people and as a planet we suffer from upward mobility and downward nobility.”

“As you take your eyes off the false prize (of more, better, and different stuff), you put them on the real prizes: friends, family, sharing, caring, learning, meeting challenges, intimacy, rest, and being present, connected, and respected. In other words, those best things in life that are free. Like all things natural, building this wealth takes time, attention, patience, and reciprocity (that volleying of giving and receiving that builds relationships).”

“But while the online education business has a very low bar entry — anyone can piece together a few web services and, voilà, have paying students — success is not a guarantee.”

“Consumption seems to be our favorite high, our nationally sanctioned addiction, the all-American form of substance abuse.”

“Could we choose to amend the rules of the game to create a society that values people over profits, life over pollution, mutual care over guns and prisons, vision over dysfunction?”

“Did we win the industrial revolution?”

“Endless desire is one of the pitfalls of human nature, and one of the first things you need to cure if you want to get ahead more quickly.”

“Find out how much money you have earned in your lifetime — the sum total of your gross income, from the first penny you ever earned to your most recent paycheck.”

“For so many people, the stronger the evidence of failed strategies, the deeper they cling to their ways.”

“Frugality is enjoying the virtue of getting good value for every minute of your life energy and from everything you have the use of.”

“Having more is an endless horizon, no matter how much you have.”

“He who knows he has enough is rich.”

“How you spend your money is how you vote on what exists in the world.”

“If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough.”

“If you were money, would you hang out with you?”

“In an environment of more is better, 'enough' is like the horizon — always receding. You lose the ability to identify that point of sufficiency at which you can choose to stop. This is a psychological cul-de-sac, an invisible catch-22 of the consumer myth of more. If more is better, then what I have is not enough.”

“In fact, we now meet most of our needs, wants, and desires through money. We buy everything from hope to happiness. We no longer live life. We consume it.”

“Instead of a dark box billionaire, you are probably hoping to become a lighthearted, productive, free person who just happens to never have to worry about money again.”

“Instead of leisure being simply 'relaxed activity', it was transformed into an opportunity for increased consumption — even consumption of leisure itself (as in travel and vacations).”

“It is easier to tell our therapist about our sex life than it is to tell our accountant about our finances.”

“Just as we can get caught in outmoded habit-patterns passed down through generations, we can also get trapped by our habitual thinking just as much as – and just as erroneously as — people who maintained until recently that the earth was visibly and verifiably flat. We also get stuck in unconscious and invisible boxes that limit our ability to think in new ways.”

“Learn to choose quality of life over standard of living.”

“Marketing theory says that people are driven by fear, by the promise of exclusivity, by guilt and greed, and by the need for approval. Advertising technology, armed with market research and sophisticated psychology, aims to throw us off balance emotionally — and then promises to resolve our discomfort with a product.”

“Money is not really the thing you’re after — after all, would you lock yourself in a dark, silent box forever in exchange for becoming a billionaire?”

“Money is something we choose to trade our life energy for.”