The best 100+ sustainable design and green living quotes

Sustainable design is about taking what we have and making it last as long as possible. It’s about reusing materials and making something new out of something old—it’s about taking care of things so they don’t break down into nothingness. Sustainable design means that when we die, there will still be things around us left over from our lives here on earth.

It means leaving behind something worth remembering instead of just disappearing into oblivion like dust in the wind. In the words of Imran Khan, Good design is sustainable design.

Here are 100+ of the best, most inspiring and truth telling quotes about creating sustainability and how you can make a difference by living green and being mindful of your impact on the environment. (Accompanied by stunning photography from some of the most beautiful gardens found in luxury hotels around the world).

• The best way to predict future is to create it. – Peter Drucker
• “Sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” – Gro Harlem Brundtland
• “Sustainability is a political choice, not a technical one. It’s not a question of whether we can be sustainable, but whether we choose to be” – Gary Lawrence
• “There must be a better way to make the things we want, a way that doesn’t spoil the sky, or the rain or the land” – Paul McCartney
• Our biggest challenge in this new century is to take an idea that seems abstract – sustainable development – and turn it into a reality for all the world’s people. – Kofi Annan
• No matter how complex global problems may seem, it is we ourselves who have given rise to them. They cannot be beyond our power to resolve. – Daisaku Ikeda
• How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life? – Charles A. Lindbergh
• The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them. – Paul Hawken
• Without environmental sustainability, economic stability and social cohesion cannot be achieved. – Phil Harding
• Reducing our levels of consumption will not be a sacrifice but a bonus if we simply redefine the meaning of the word ‘success. – David Wann
• What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another. – Mahatma Gandhi
• Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man. – Stewart Udall
• Look after the land and the land will look after you, destroy the land and it will destroy you. – Aboriginal Proverb
• You have to hold yourself accountable for your actions, and that’s how we’re going to protect the Earth. – Julia Butterfly Hill
• The most sustainable way is to not make things. The second most sustainable way is to make something very useful, to solve a problem that hasn’t been solved. – Thomas Sigsgaard
• Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. – Aldo Leopold
• A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people. – Franklin D. Roosevelt
• The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. – Luther Standing Bear
• We can’t just consume our way to a more sustainable world. – Jennifer Nini

• Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect. – Chief Seattle, 1854
• Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction. – Dr. Edward O. Wilson
• The natural environment sustains the life of all beings universally. – Dalai Lama
• An act of violence against nature should be judged as severely as that against society or another person. – Dr. Michael W.Fox
• Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so called scientific knowledge. – Thomas Edison
• He that plants trees loves others beside himself. – Thomas Fuller

• We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls. – Derrick Jensen
• There must be more to life than having everything! – Maurice Sendak
• The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. – Hans Hofmann

• We have to cultivate contentment with what we have. We really don’t need much. When you know this, the mind settles down. Cultivate generosity. Delight in giving. Learn to live lightly. In this way, we can begin to transform what is negative into what is positive. This is how we start to grow up. – Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
• We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. – Aldo Leopold
• Being green is more than just buying ‘eco’. It is an unshakable commitment to a sustainable lifestyle. – Jennifer Nini
• The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction. – Rachel Carson
• In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops. – Paul Brooks
• How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life? – Charles A. Lindbergh
• It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment. – Ansel Adams
• The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. – Carl Sagan

• Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world. – Archbishop Desmond Tutu
• There is a great need for the introduction of new values in our society, where bigger is not necessarily better, where slower can be faster, and where less can be more. – Gaylord Nelson
• In our rich consumers’ civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions. – Max Lerner
• Our life is frittered away by detail…Simplify, simplify, simplify! Simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. – Henry Thoreau
• People ‘over-produce’ pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it. – Ha-Joon Chang
• Where the quality of life goes down for the environment, the quality of life goes down for humans. – George Holland
• We never know the worth of water till the well is dry. – Thomas Fuller
• When the soil disappears, the soul disappears. – Ymber Delecto
• …most of the damage we cause to the planet is the result of our own ignorance. – Yvon Chouinard
• A margin of life is developed by Nature for all living things – including man. All life forms obey Nature’s demands – except man, who has found ways of ignoring them. – Eugene M. Poirot
• For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death. – Rachel Carson
• Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites. – William Ruckelshaus
• We can never have enough of Nature. – Henry David Thoreau

• All I want is to stand in a field and to smell green, to taste air, to feel the earth want me, without all this concrete hating me. – Phillip Pulfrey
• Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them. – Albert Einstein
• Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. – Margaret Mead
• How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. – Anne Frank
• I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do. – Edward Everett Hale
• Do not wait for extraordinary circumstances to do good action; try to use ordinary situations. – Jean Paul Richter
• Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money. – Cree Indian Proverb
• The greatest danger to our future is apathy. – Jane Goodall
• Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed. – Mahatma Gandhi
• We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. – Howard Zinn
• Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyle. – Pope John Paul II
• The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river. – Ross Perot
• The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them. – Paul Hawken
• It angers me when sustainability gets used as a buzzword. For 90 percent of the world, sustainability is a matter of survival. – Cameron Sinclair
• Unless we are willing to encourage our children to reconnect with and appreciate the natural world, we can’t expect them to help protect and care for it. – David Suzuki

• Forests and meat animals compete for the same land. The prodigious appetite of the affluent nations for meat means that agribusiness can pay more than those who want to preserve or restore the forest. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet – for the sake of hamburgers. – Peter Singer
• Consume less; share better. – Hervé Kempf
• Be the change you wish to see in the world. – Mahatma Gandhi
• The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible. – Edward O. Wilson
• We are not above nature, we are a part of nature. – Jennifer Nini
• You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make. – Jane Goodall
• The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it. – Robert Swan
• The best way to predict the future is to design it. – Abraham Lincoln
• There is no beauty in the finest cloth if it makes hunger and unhappiness – Mahatma Gandhi
• Buy less, choose well, make it last. –Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer
• As consumers, we have so much power to change the world by just being careful in what we buy. – Emma Watson
• Waste isn’t waste until we waste it. –Will.I.Am
• Cheap fashion is really far from that. It may be cheap in terms of the financial cost, but very expensive when it comes to the environment and the cost of human life. –Sass Brown
• Fashion shouldn’t cost the earth – Environmental Audit Company
• Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected. – William Plomer
• If you don’t like the way the world is, you change it…one step at a time. – Marian Wright Edelman
• The most sustainable way is to not make things. The second most sustainable way is to make something very useful, to solve a problem that hasn’t been solved. – Thomas Sigsgaard
• Don’t be into trends. Don’t make fashion own you, but you decide what you are, what you express by the way you dress and the way you live. — Gianni Versace
• Become an active citizen through your wardrobe. -Livia Firth

• Everything is designed. Few things are designed well. — Brian Reed
• If it can’t be reduced, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production. – Peter Seeger
• Waste is a design flaw. – Kate Kreba
• Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist. – Sir David Attenborough
• There is no such thing as ‘away’. When we throw anything away it must go somewhere. – Annie Leonard
• An economy that puts back what it takes out, that is sustainable by design. – Matthew Bishop
• Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent. — Joe Sparano
• Make it simple, but significant – Don Draper
• Leave it better than you found it. –Bruce A. Nordstrom
• To be young and aware is to know you’re being lied to; to know that a bright green future is possible; to know that we can reimagine the world, rebuild our cities, redesign our lives, retool our factories, distribute innovation and creativity and all live in a world that is not only better than the alternative, but much better than the world we have now. – Alex Steffen
• Bringing nature back into the city is a way to deal with urban sprawl. If cities feel a little more natural, people like to live there rather than moving out and dividing up another piece of land that shouldn’t be touched. – Stone Gossard
• An endless number of green buildings doesn’t make a sustainable city. – Jan Gehl
• We can’t just consume our way to a more sustainable world. – Jennifer Nini
• Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer. – Pete Hein
• To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master. – Milton Glaser
• Simplicity, suitability and proportion. – Elsie de Wolfe
• In nature nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, but everything is transformed. – Antoine Laurent Delavosier
• This is my deepest belief. That there are too many of us keeping our hearts and minds on what is not working in the world around us, than on what is. As a result, we’re getting engulfed in darkness. For you can only walk towards what your eyes can see. Memory Eden is my personal mission to keep MY eyes focused on whatever is good, true, noble and right. On beautiful gardens, idyllic edens and sustainable spaces. On the people, places and spaces that inspire me to treasure and protect our gorgeous planet. Not so I can boast in the things that I see. But so I can keep my eyes averted from darkness and walk boldly towards the light. – Neva Read, founder Memory Eden.

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