98 Quotes by Charles Eisenstein

I am saying that there is a time to do, and a time not to do, and that when we are slave to the habit of doing we are unable to distinguish between them.

To be fully in service to something one has experienced as real is the essence of leadership in a nonhierarchical age. A leader is the holder of a story, someone whose experience of its reality is deep enough so that she can hold the belief on behalf of others.

Today's usury-money is part of a story of separation, in which 'more for me is less for you.' That is the essence of interest: I will only "share" money with you if end up with even more of it in return. On the systemic level as well, interest on money creates competition, anxiety and the polarization of wealth. Meanwhile, the phrase 'more for me is less for you' is also the motto of the ego, and a truism given the discrete and separate self of modern economics, biology, and philosophy. 

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.

Whether or not it is true that climate change exacerbates other environmental problems, the rush to name a unitary cause of a complex problem should give us pause. The pattern is familiar. It is none other than war thinking, which also depends on identifying a unitary cause of a complex problem. That cause is called the enemy, and the solution is to defeat the enemy.

To put it in more shocking terms, it doesn't matter if the skeptics are right or not, because the assumptions on which the debate is based are already enough to doom us to a dystopian future.

When we chop nature into bits in an attempt to understand it, we lose sight of the relationships among those bits. But ecological healing is all about the healing of relationships.

Even the most thorough change happens once choice at a time

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.