Top 90 Charles Eisenstein Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue, and depression are all ways that we withhold our full participation in the program of life we are offered. When the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way.”

— Charles Eisenstein

Featured in: Procrastination Quotes

2. “The gift economy represents a shift from consumption to contribution, transaction to trust, scarcity to abundance and isolation to community.”

— Charles Eisenstein

3. “In a gift economy, the more you give, the richer you are.”

— Charles Eisenstein

4. “We sense that ‘normal’ isn’t coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human.”

— Charles Eisenstein

5. “Trust your intuition and be guided by love.”

— Charles Eisenstein

Featured in: Intuition Quotes

6. “True discipline is really just self-remembering; no forcing or fighting is necessary.”

— Charles Eisenstein

7. “More than a mere alternative strategy, regenerative agriculture represents a fundamental shift in our culture’s relationship to nature.”

— Charles Eisenstein

8. “How do we change the world? Change the story.”

— Charles Eisenstein

9. “Ultimately, work on self is inseperable from work in the world. Each mirrors the other; each is a vehicle for the other. When we change ourselves, our values and actions change as well. When we do work in the world, internal issues arise that we must face or be rendered ineffective.”

— Charles Eisenstein

10. “We have to create miracles. A miracle is not the intersession of an external divine agency in violation of the laws of physics. A miracle is simply something that is impossible from an old story but possible from within a new one. It is an expansion of what is possible.”

— Charles Eisenstein

11. “Enlightenment is a group activity.”

— Charles Eisenstein

12. “Even the most thorough change happens once choice at a time.”

— Charles Eisenstein

13. “The primary method by which governments increase their control is by creating fear.”

— Charles Eisenstein

14. “No one’s ever completely broken. It’s just a matter of how much has to fall apart before the ember of life is exposed to air.”

— Charles Eisenstein

15. “We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.”

— Charles Eisenstein

16. “We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are.”

— Charles Eisenstein

17. “We have to believe in a more beautiful world in order to serve it.”

— Charles Eisenstein

18. “What you’re looking for, you won’t find. But only by looking for it can it find you.”

— Charles Eisenstein

19. “The present convergence of crises––in money, energy, education, health, water, soil, climate, politics, the environment, and more––is a birth crisis, expelling us from the old world into a new.”

— Charles Eisenstein

20. “When both sides of a controversy revel in the defeat and humiliation of the other side, in fact they are on the same side: the side of war.”

— Charles Eisenstein

21. “The state of interbeing is a vulnerable state. It is the vulnerability of the naive altruist, of the trusting lover, of the unguarded sharer. To enter it, one must leave behind the seeming shelter of a control-based life, protected by walls of cynicism, judgment, and blame.”

— Charles Eisenstein

22. “I think most kids have a sense that it’s not supposed to be this way. You’re not supposed to hate Monday, or be happy when you don’t have to go to school. School should be something that you love. Life should be something that you love.”

— Charles Eisenstein

23. “The logic is backwards. Genius is the result of doing what you love, not a prerequisite for it.”

— Charles Eisenstein

24. “When any of us meet someone who rejects dominant norms and values, we feel a little less crazy for doing the same. Any act of rebellion or non-participation, even on a very small scale, is therefore a political act.”

— Charles Eisenstein

25. “Play is the production of fun; entertainment is the consumption of fun.”

— Charles Eisenstein

26. “To be truly seen and heard, to be truly known, is a deep human need. Our hunger for it is so omnipresent, so much a part of our experience of life, that we no more know what it is we are missing than a fish knows it is wet.”

— Charles Eisenstein

27. “Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing, because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation.”

— Charles Eisenstein

28. “When everything is subject to money, then the scarcity of money makes everything scarce, including the basis of human life and happiness. Such is the life of the slave – one whose actions are compelled by threat to survival. Perhaps the deepest indication of our slavery is the monetization of time.”

— Charles Eisenstein

29. “The holistic acupuncturist and the sea turtle rescuer may not be able to explain the feeling, ‘We are serving the same thing,’ but they are. Both are in service to an emerging story of the People that is the defining mythology of a new kind of civilization.”

— Charles Eisenstein

30. “An economist says that essentially more for you is less for me, but the lover knows that more for you is more for me, too.”

— Charles Eisenstein

31. “Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?”

— Charles Eisenstein

32. “Are the problems of the world caused by bad people who need to be crushed? Or do people do bad things when they are in a certain situation? If it is the latter, then we can go around crushing the villains for another thousand years and nothing will change.”

— Charles Eisenstein

33. “You can’t have community as an add-on to a monetized life. You have to actually need each other.”

— Charles Eisenstein

34. “The financial crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money.”

— Charles Eisenstein

35. “Each person you interact with, is an entire universe unto themselves, a Divine Being, unspeakabley precious.”

— Charles Eisenstein

36. “Regenerative agriculture represents more than a shift of practices. It is also a shift in paradigm and in our basic relationship to nature.”

— Charles Eisenstein

37. “When do you manipulate others for your own advantage? When I notice myself doing it, usually it is when I am feeling insecure.”

— Charles Eisenstein

38. “One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect.”

— Charles Eisenstein

39. “Contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.”

— Charles Eisenstein

40. “A miracle is an invitation into a new story.”

— Charles Eisenstein

41. “We never were separate from nature and never will be, but the dominant culture on earth has long imagined itself to be apart from nature and destined one day to transcend it. We have lived in a mythology of separation.”

— Charles Eisenstein

42. “Non-inflationary economic growth – an increase in the production of goods and services – is structurally necessary for the current money system to exist. That is what drives the relentless conversion of life into money.”

— Charles Eisenstein

43. “Why are we so desperate to escape the material world? Is it really so bleak? Or could it be, rather, that we have made it bleak: obscured its vibrant mystery with our ideological blinders, severed its infinite connectedness with our categories, suppressed its spontaneous order with our pavement, reduced its infinite variety with our commodities, shattered its eternity with our time-keeping, and denied its abundance with our money system?”

— Charles Eisenstein

44. “We need to change our habits of thought, belief, and doing as well as change our systems. Each level reinforces the other: Our habits and beliefs form the psychic substructure of our system, which in turn induces in us the corresponding beliefs and habits.”

— Charles Eisenstein

45. “Community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don’t depend on your neighbors for anything. You can just pay someone to do it.”

— Charles Eisenstein

46. “The force of love, the force of reunion is unstoppable.”

— Charles Eisenstein

47. “When we must pay the true price for the depletion of nature’s gifts, materials will become more precious to us, and economic logic will reinforce, and not contradict, our heart’s desire to treat the world with reverence and, when we receive nature’s gifts, to use them well.”

— Charles Eisenstein

48. “Utopia is a collective shift of perception away. Abundance is all around us. Only our efforts at tower-building blind us to it, our gaze forever skyward, forever seeking to escape this Earth, this feeling, this moment.”

— Charles Eisenstein

49. “How beautiful can life be? We hardly dare imagine it.”

— Charles Eisenstein

50. “Certainly this is what many people feel during empty moments or deliberate experiments at meditation: a churning unease that says “I should be doing something”. This cultural compulsion is so strong that even spiritual practices such as meditation and prayer are easily converted into just another thing to do, moments mortgaged to the campaign of improving life.”

— Charles Eisenstein