Top 60 Satish Kumar Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Economy without ecology means managing the human nature relationship without knowing the delicate balance between humankind and the natural world.”

— Satish Kumar

Featured in: Quotes About Balance

2. “Human happiness, true prosperity and joyful living can only emerge from a life of elegant simplicity, embedded in the arts and crafts.”

— Satish Kumar

3. “Earth is a living entity. And if it’s a living organism, then we have to have a reverence for all life. Food should be local, organic rather than grown with chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides.”

— Satish Kumar

4. “Lead me from death to life, from falsehood to truth; Lead me from despair to hope, from fear to trust; Lead me from hate to love, from war to peace; Let peace fill our heart, our world, our universe.”

— Satish Kumar

5. “If you can kill animals, the same attitude can kill human beings. The mentality is the same which exploits nature and which creates wars.”

— Satish Kumar

6. “Quality and perfection are achieved with time. You do not create a perfect painting or a perfect poem by hurrying. Time is always coming.”

— Satish Kumar

7. “Instead of seeking success we should look for fulfillment. And fulfillment is giving total attention to the process of living.”

— Satish Kumar

8. “If we had kept the vision of interconnectedness, we would not have created the kind of environmental crisis facing the world today.”

— Satish Kumar

9. “We are not slaves of the market. Our human life has a greater meaning than making money, making profit, and working for the market or for multinational corporations.”

— Satish Kumar

10. “The old story is a story of measurement. And the New Story is to bring measurement and meaning together. You cannot measure meaning.”

— Satish Kumar

11. “The great work of social transformation begins with the first small step of stopping, calming, relaxing, reflecting and acting in a beneficial way.”

— Satish Kumar

12. “We have to shift our attitude of ownership of nature to relationship with nature. The moment you change from ownership to relationship, you create a sense of the sacred.”

— Satish Kumar

13. “We need to learn to live in the here and now; this moment is the best moment. Live it fully.”

— Satish Kumar

14. “We are dependent on each other. Therefore, replenishing the soil, replenishing society and being part of one continuum – that’s the new story.”

— Satish Kumar

15. “If individuals start to walk on the path of spirit and feel a sense of the sacred connectedness, then social, economic and political problems will also begin to get resolved.”

— Satish Kumar

16. “The way to healthy living is to shift from quantitative economic growth to quality of life, food, water and air – to shift from craving to contentment and from greed to gratitude.”

— Satish Kumar

17. “I want to see a New Story education, which is not only about intellectual knowledge – not only about measurement – not only about academic achievement. It is also about heart, feelings, emotions, relationship, love, compassion, generosity, beauty. All these values are part of the heart.”

— Satish Kumar

18. “Multinational corporations and a market economy have transformed human beings into instruments of making money. Human beings should be the end. And money should be the means to an end.”

— Satish Kumar

19. “If happiness was in money or power, then America should be the happiest country in the world, but it is not.”

— Satish Kumar

20. “Each of us needs to eliminate our anger, fear and greed. The roots of social conflicts and political tensions are in personal anger, fear and greed.”

— Satish Kumar

21. “We human beings are spiritual beings. We have soul. We have spirit. We have mind. We have consciousness. We want fulfillment, we want happiness, we want satisfaction, we want joy. We want imagination. We want art, culture, music.”

— Satish Kumar

22. “Large numbers of young people are waking up. And they are saying, “We are not here just to work for multinational corporations and make money for them. We are here to live. We have to find the meaning of life.””

— Satish Kumar

23. “In addition to world conflicts, the most challenging problem we face today is hunger, deprivation and social injustice. Because we’re ruled by separate self-interest, we go on accumulating personal wealth, ignoring the well being of the others.”

— Satish Kumar

24. “How much I can learn from a tree! The tree is my church, the tree is my temple, the tree is my mantra, the tree is my poem and my prayer.”

— Satish Kumar

25. “Education provides you a profession. But not vocation. You do it only because you need to work to earn money to buy your food, buy your clothes, pay the bills. Our life has a greater meaning, and a greater purpose.”

— Satish Kumar

26. “Your children are not your children. They are lives longing for itself. They come here with their own destiny. Give them your love. They will find their own way.”

— Satish Kumar

27. “Happiness is possible only when we are kind to others and contented within.”

— Satish Kumar

28. “If we go on using the Earth uncaringly and without replenishing it, then we are just greedy consumers.”

— Satish Kumar

29. “I was pursuing the inner path at the expense of the rest of my being and the rest of the world.”

— Satish Kumar

30. “Monks will have three begging bowls for their food: one for water, one for liquid food, one for dry food.”

— Satish Kumar

31. “Before the scientific rationalism took hold of our minds and before we became succumbed to a materialistic worldview, the Western philosophy was holistic and relational, and even now there are many scientists in the West seeing things totally interconnected.”

— Satish Kumar

32. “It is only an illusion that time is running out. This is where the problem of fear arises. We become anxious that “I don’t have enough time and I have to do everything quickly.” We need to turn our attention away from results, achievements and outcomes.”

— Satish Kumar

33. “You have no skills in your hands. You have no education of understanding the meaning and the purpose and the compassion and the relationship. You have just a profession.”

— Satish Kumar

34. “Through yoga, meditation and other spiritual practices, we can learn the ways of personal equanimity. We can also learn how to use language in beneficial ways.”

— Satish Kumar

35. “In fact, the environmental crisis is related to the crisis of aesthetics, crisis of social cohesion and the crisis of spiritual values.”

— Satish Kumar

36. “What we call ‘economic growth’ is in fact a growth in waste and a decline in the health of natural habitat.”

— Satish Kumar

37. “When you come to the spiritual needs, the emotional needs, the needs of our inner life, then politics and business and technology are completely impotent. They are completely unable to meet and address the needs of human beings.”

— Satish Kumar

38. “Of course, we all need to have basic necessities met, such as good health care, good food, good education and good housing. But what is good? Having too much is bad, as having too little is also bad.”

— Satish Kumar

39. “We depend on the gifts of nature, but these gifts must be received with gratitude and not exploited or abused.”

— Satish Kumar

40. “One was a book I read by Mahatma Gandhi. In it was a passage where he said that religion, the pursuing of the inner journey, should not be separated from the pursuing of the outer and social journey, because we are not isolated beings.”

— Satish Kumar

41. “If we remove ourselves from the world, we are pretending that we can follow our own individual enlightenment and let the rest of the world go to hell, so to speak.”

— Satish Kumar

42. “Wars and conflicts begin in the mind, then they are expressed in words and then executed through physical action, so personal transformation is intricately connected with the social and political transformation.”

— Satish Kumar

43. “The children are being conditioned to think that the purpose of life is to get a good job. You get paid but you don’t get satisfaction from your work.”

— Satish Kumar

44. “That was my childhood. I grew up with the monks, studying Sanskrit and meditating for hours in the morning and hours in the evening, and going once a day to beg for food.”

— Satish Kumar

45. “All the big problems of the world today are routed in the philosophy of separateness and dualism.”

— Satish Kumar

46. “We then came to the Soviet Union. One day we were walking and carrying our banner and distributing a few leaflets in Russian to people, and we met two women on the road.”

— Satish Kumar

47. “People are are moving away from the fossil fuel-based economy, to a more renewable economy. That is what is called the ‘transition town’ movement. There are three hundred towns in Britain that are making this transition. Taking energy from solar power, from wind power, from water power.”

— Satish Kumar

48. “At the moment, for example, maybe ten percent of money in the world is related to goods and services. Ninety percent of money is just moving around the world, chasing money. So, money has become the ruler. And we have become the servant.”

— Satish Kumar

49. “In spite of nuclear weapons, large numbers of American citizens feel totally insecure. And in spite of so much wealth, industry and technology, many Americans are living under deprivation and anxiety. So happiness is not in accumulation of material goods, it’s in sharing and caring.”

— Satish Kumar

50. “The road to climate stability is straight and the solutions simple, and yet scientists, economists, industrialists and politicians are busy making them complicated.”

— Satish Kumar