Quotes from Andy Couturier

Why is it that so many people start to value money so much that they trade in most of the hours and years of their life in order to get it?

Time is what we have in this life, and how we use it determines what our life is.

Often I'll go outside and just place my hands on the soil, even if there's no work to do on it. When I am filled with worries, I do that and I can feel the energy of the mountains and of the trees.

I think all people want freedom, but they've got this idea inserted into their head about money.

They have taken the idea of nonharming, of gentleness toward the earth, to a very radical level. Even the weeds are not enemies.

My goal is to draw a line with some 'flavor' to it.

Sometimes just to touch the ground is enough for me, even if not a single thing grows from what I plant.

If you don't have a whole lot of unsatisfied people, the economy stops dead, doesn't it?

If you join some kind of association, your own true way of thinking gets shackled. You do things just to give yourself that feeling of ease.

What art should do, I think, is advance the generation into the next era. It should be one step ahead of the ordinary, ahead of what is already known. Art is what pulls on the next age. I'm not saying that my art is that, but that it would be good if it could be.

I thought I should make a place to bring light down into this world. All things that become realities start in that place of someone imagining them.

I finally understood that I couldn't avoid working to provide for myself, but that can also be a wonderful thing, a beautiful thing.

Doing nothing all day—it's difficult at first. Being busy is a habit, and a hard one to break.

If you start to accumulate things, you can't travel, so I lived without. I figured I could live a whole life without anything,

Even one second ahead of you is darkness.

Although Yamashita and Amemiya grow and prepare their own food—both of which definitely take a lot of time—they seem to be suffused in timelessness, in an endless present.

Don't imitate our life. Please learn from our life. Build up your own new life. Just be as much like yourself as you can be.

We exist in the midst of eternity all the time.

If I'm busy, I might overlook something magnificent and splendid like a rare mushroom in the forest … and who knows when I might see such an amazing thing again?

In almost everything in his life, he's relentlessly pursuing the question of how the common people are deceived, and constantly thinking of creative and humorous ways to make them realize it.

In the world system of increasingly discrete labor, in which each person contributes an ever smaller part to an ever vaster manufacturing of so-called "goods," the act of disentangling oneself from the whole might, in hindsight, appear quite radical. But for the person concerned, in that moment, exiting the system feels like the only available path.

People keep finding themselves in an unforgiving matrix of overwork, stress, and unwilling complicity in the destruction of the earth.

How funny it is that one of the fundamental definitions of being "modern" is the ability to avoid physical labor, when it might be that very thing that could provide us with such depth of connection to ourselves and to the world.

Whatever he did, he did it, he says, isshou-kenmei, a word that translates loosely as "with all your heart," but a more literal translation would be "hanging your whole life on it.