Quotes about Consumption

Part of the beauty of the monastic life lies in the ability to live simply with few desires and to consume only what you need.

Each of us, for the most part, continues his daily life, contributing to the maintenance and consolidation of the machinery of production and consumption. We eat, drink, work, and divert ourselves, as if nothing is going to happen.

True happiness does not reside in the ill-considered consumption of goods paid for by the suffering, famine, and death of others, but in a life enlightened by the feeling of a constant responsibility for one's neighbor.

the whale would by all hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite.

That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp

The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die.

Hundreds would never have known want if they had not first known waste.

Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people have said so. But this one takes the cake: the manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point that out. The conspicious consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spirtual error, or even bad manners.

Pushing a refrigerated green vegetable from one end of the earth to another is, let's face it, a bizarre use of fuel. But there's a simpler reason to pass up off-season asparagus: it's inferior.

The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.

When we read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music, than we can possibly absorb the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to, is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind it than yesterday's newspaper.

Making things (cement, steel, plastic) 31% Plugging in (electricity) 27% Growing things (plants, animals) 19% Getting around (planes, trucks, cargo ships) 16% Keeping warm and cool (heating, cooling, refrigeration) 7%