Vicki Robin Quotes Page 2

“National Opinion Research Center surveys reveal that the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as 'very happy' has been steadily declining since the late 1950s.”

“No matter how much you have, that voice of 'more would be better' drives you to make acquisition the name of your game. Greed is one of the many strings in the human heart, and it can be pro-survival, but unchecked by a sense of fairness, balance, and love, it can gut our capacity for joy.”

“Once we’re above the survival level, the difference between prosperity and poverty lies simply in our degree of gratitude.”

“Once you catch on to what clutter is, you’ll find it everywhere. Isn’t meaningless activity a form of clutter? How many of the power lunches, cocktail parties, social events, and long evenings glued to your screens have been clutter—activities that add nothing positive to your life? What about disorganized days full of busyness with no sense of accomplishment?”

“One day a young girl watched her mother prepare a ham for baking. At one point the daughter asked, “Mom, why did you cut off both ends of the ham?” “Well, because my mother always did,” said the mother. “But why?” “I don’t know. Let’s go ask Grandma.”
So they went to Grandma’s and asked her, “Grandma, when you prepared the ham for baking, you always cut off both ends. Why did you do that?” “My mother always did it,” said Grandma. “But why?” “I don’t know. Let’s go ask Great-grandma.” So off they went to Great-grandma’s. “Great-grandma, when you prepared the ham for baking, you always cut off both ends. Why did you do that?” “Well,” Great-grandma said, “the pan was too small.”

“Passion, pain, what’s at hand — these are doorways to finding a purpose beyond material acquisition.”

“People in industrialized nations used to be called 'citizens'. Now we are 'consumers' — which means (according to the dictionary definition of 'consume') people who 'use up', 'waste', 'destroy', and 'squander'.”

“Post–Industrial Revolution, especially post–information and tech revolutions, we learn to spend most of our time selling one small slice of our talents to pay for everything else we need.”

“So much dissatisfaction comes from focusing on what we don’t have that the simple exercise of acknowledging and valuing what we do have can transform our outlook.”

“So what if you’ve been blowing every paycheck on 'rewarding' yourself for surviving another week?”

“Some of us just accept debt as a part of adult life and trod on, shackled by consequences we don’t fully understand.”

“The bottom line is that we think we work to pay the bills – but we spend more than we make on more than we need, which sends us back to work to get the money to spend to get more stuff — that sends us back to work again!”

“The key is remembering that anything you buy and don’t use, anything you throw away, anything you consume and don’t enjoy is money down the drain, wasting your life energy and wasting the finite resources of the planet. Any waste of your life energy means more hours lost to the rat race, making a dying. Frugality is the user-friendly and earth-friendly lifestyle.”

“The only real asset you have is your time. The hours of your life.”

“The push for full employment, along with the growth of advertising, has created a populace increasingly oriented toward work and toward earning more money in order to consume more resources.”

“The world needs you to show up and follow your dreams.”

“To be frugal means to have a high joy-to-stuff ratio. If you get one unit of joy for each material possession, that’s frugal. But if you need ten possessions to even begin registering on the joy meter, you’re missing the point of being alive.”

“To be successful, cultivate positive attitudes of self-respect, pride in your contribution to your workplace, dedication to your job, cooperation with your employers and coworkers, desire to do the job right, personal integrity, responsibility, and accountability — and do it just because you value your life energy.”

“To let go of clutter, then, is not dearth; it’s lightening up and opening up space for something new to happen.”

“Values are the chosen limits that allow our lives to deepen rather than dissipate.”

“Waste lies not in the number of possessions but in the failure to enjoy them.”

“We have devalued the price of the things we need most to survive on a daily basis yet overvalued many of the things we can live without.”

“We hit a fulfillment ceiling and never recognized that the formula of 'money = fulfillment' not only had stopped working but had started to work against us. No matter how much we bought, the fulfillment curve kept heading down.”

“We no longer live life. We consume it.”

“We shift from comparing ourselves to others to considering our real needs and desires. We shift from 'more' to 'enough' and ultimately get more of what money can’t buy. Priceless.”

“We take our identity and our self-worth from our jobs.”

“What kind of society turns its young people into a profit center for the debt industry?”

“What's needed isn't change; it is transformation. Change seeks different solutions to intractable problems. Transformation asks different questions so that we can see the problems in a new light.”

“You sell your time for money. It doesn’t matter that Ned over there sells his time for a hundred dollars and you sell yours for twenty dollars an hour. Ned’s money is irrelevant to you. The only real asset you have is your time. The hours of your life.”

“Your dreams, values, memories, and stories make for endlessly interesting conversations. If you hear a dream or goal you like from someone else, steal it!”