Looking for some homesteading inspiration? These homesteading quotes are full of wise words, inspirational sayings, superstitions and more. Below I’ve broken these quotes into sections to make them easier to find. You can find homesteading quotes on raising animals, growing vegetables, natural beauty, hard work and sustainability.
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Contents
Homesteading Quotes: About Homesteading
“Homesteading, at its core, is counter-cultural from our consumerist-driven culture. This is a lifestyle that glorifies salvaging and reclaiming, repairing rather than buying new, and trading and bartering when money is tight.” -Unknown
“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”-Aldo Leopold
“The mundanity of those chores, the repetition, acts as a kind of meditation. I start each day with a series of numbers and questions written on a piece of paper, put them in my pocket and get on with the business of farming. By mid-morning the answers are clear.”-Hannah Rothschild
“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.” – Masanobu Fukuoka
“Ultimately, the only wealth that can sustain any community, economy, or nation is derived from the photosynthetic process – green plants growing on regenerating soil.” –Allan Savory
“Our land is like a poem, in a patchwork landscape of other poems, written by hundreds of people, both those here now and the many hundreds who came before us, with each generation adding new layers of meaning and experience.” –James Rebanks
“Farms and food production should be, I submit, at least as important as who pierced their navel in Hollywood this week. Please tell me I’m not the only one who believes this. Please. As a culture, we think we’re well educated, but I’m not sure that what we’ve learned necessarily helps us survive.” –Joel Salatin
“For me, nearly all of our problems are solved with a recipe composed mostly of homesteading and permaculture.” -Paul Wheaton
“I think America’s food culture is embedded in fast-food culture. And the real question that we have is: How are we going to teach slow-food values in a fast-food world? Of course, it’s very, very difficult to do, especially when children have grown up eating fast food and the values that go with that.” –Alice Waters
“Despite all of our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.” –Paul Harvey
“Here in the country, on a little farm in southern Georgia, I am building a quiet life of resistance. I am a radical peasant, and every day I take out my little hammer, and I keep building.” -Janisse Ray
“Agriculture is always going to be a top priority, everybody’s going to always need to eat and everybody’s going to always need some help with that so as long as you’re willing to put in the hours, there’s a job there for you.”-Brady Blasher
I find my greatest happiness in thinking of those days in Homestead when I labored to bring a thing to perfection entirely by myself. In the evenings, I would go into the hills and look down on my work, and I knew that it was good, and my heart was elated. -Charles M. Schwab
“Agriculture was the first occupation of man, and as it embraces the whole earth, it is the foundation of all other industries.”-E.W. Stewart
“Agriculture is the noblest of all alchemy; for it turns earth, and even manure, into gold, conferring upon its cultivator the additional reward of health.” -Paul Chatfield
“Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.” -Daniel Webster
“I would rather be on my farm than be emperor of the world.” -George Washington
“A farmer is a magician who produces money from the mud.” -Amit Kalantri
Homesteading Quotes: Community
Is there any practice less selfish, any time less wasted than preparing something nourishing and delicious for the people you love?” –Michael Pollan
“A privileging of individual rights over group goods can lead to serious problems, as we’ve seen with the antivaccination movement.” – Emily Marchar
“Ultimately, the only wealth that can sustain any community, economy, or nation is derived from the photosynthetic process – green plants growing on regenerating soil.” –Allan Savory
“Agriculture is the greatest and fundamentally the most important of our industries. The cities are but the branches of the tree of national life, the roots of which go deeply into the land. We all flourish or decline with the farm.” –Bernard Baruch
“Strong communities are built around local, real food. Food we trust to nourish our bodies, the farmer and planet.” –Kimbal Musk
“Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education.” – Alice Waters
“There isn’t a child who hasn’t gone out into the brave new world who eventually doesn’t return to the old homestead carrying a bundle of dirty clothes.” -Art Buchwald
“Tell me and I’ll forget. Teach me and I’ll remember. Involve me and I’ll learn.” -Benjamin Franklin
“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.” – Thomas Jefferson
Homesteading Quotes: Beauty
“Let the beauty we love be what you do.” -Rumi
“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.“ -Claude Monet
“I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.” –Andy Warhol
“Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.” -Rumi
“I like people who get excited about the change of seasons, the sound of the ocean, watching the sunset, the smell of rain and starry nights.” -Brooke Hampton
“In the night the cabbages catch at the moon, the leaves drip silver, the rows of cabbages are a series of little silver waterfalls in the moon.” – Carl Sandburg
“There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments.” – Janet Kilburn Phillips
“Well I do find the beauty in animals. I find beauty everywhere. I find beauty in my garden.” – Doris Day
Homesteading Quotes: Animals
“Everyone across America had the same idea at the same time. Chickens became the toilet paper of the spring.” -Melissa Gilbert
“The bee collects honey from flowers in such a way as to do the least damage or destruction to them, and he leaves them whole, undamaged and fresh, just as he found them.” – Saint Francis De Sales
“A pig has a plow on the end of its nose because it does meaningful work with it. It is built to dig and create soil disturbance, something it can’t do in a concentrated feeding environment. The omnivore has historically been a salvage operation for food scraps around the homestead.” -Joel Salatin
“I love you more than I love goats, and you know how I feel about goats”, Gaby said.” – James Patterson
“The lovely flowers embarrass me, They make me regret I am not a bee”- Emily Dickinson
“The hum of bees is the voice of the garden.” – Elizabeth Lawrence
“If I didn’t start painting, I would have raised chickens.” – Grandma Moses
“It’s good for a person to be terrorized by a goat. Hard to get high and mighty when there’s something chasing you for vegetables” – Natasha Pulley
“People don’t know how chickens can turn on you, but they can — just like mad dogs.” – Mary Ann Shaffer
“Every raw-milk cheese is an artifact of the land; it carries the imprint of the earth from which it came. A cheese—even a fresh chèvre—is never just a thing to put in your mouth. It’s a living piece of geography. A sense of place.” – Brad Kessler
Homesteading Quotes: Gardening
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” -Robert Louis Stevenson
“Some people buy lottery tickets. I plant potatoes.” –Jill Winger
“If you really want to be a good gardener, you need to understand what is going on in your soil.” -Jeff Lowenfels
“To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” –Mahatma Gandhi
“You sow, you wait for good or bad weather, you harvest, but working is something you always need to do.” -Miguel Indurain
“I grow plants for many reasons: to please my eye or to please my soul, to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience, for novelty or for nostalgia, but mostly for the joy in seeing them grow.” – David Hobson
“There’s nothing like eating food you’ve grown yourself.” – A.D. Aliwat
“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.” -Wendell Barry
“The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul.” – Alfred Austin
“Backyard gardening can inspire you to take an interest in the origins of your food and make better choices about what you put on your plate.” – Dr. Helen Delichatsios
“Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant’s hood of heart-shaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods hanging underneath could make me catch my breath.” – Michael Pollan
“Give a man a fish he eats for a day. Teach a woman to garden, and the whole neighborhood gets zucchini” – Author Unknown
“I like gardening – it’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.” – Alice Sebold
“Even the tiniest of flowers can have the toughest roots.” -Shannon Mullen
“There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.” – Alfred Austin
“All gardeners know better than other gardeners.” – Chinese proverb
“Autumn brings the harvest. There’s a race to gather the final fruits of the year’s labor, and then to dry, preserve, and store them for winter. (Because most of us no longer homestead, this autumnal hoarding impulse often expresses itself as frenzied holiday shopping.)” -Unknown
“Life begins the day you start a garden.“ -Chinese Proverb
Growing you own food is like printing your own money! – Ron Finley
“The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul.“ -Alfred Austin
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.“ -Greek Proverb
“Simple ingredients prepared in a simple way – that’s the best way to take your everyday cooking to a higher level.” -Jose Andres
Preserve and treat food as you would your body, remembering that in time food will be your body. -B.W. Richardson
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero
“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” – Audrey Hepburn
Homesteading Quotes: Hard Work
“Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion.” –Simon Sinek
“Is there any practice less selfish, any time less wasted than preparing something nourishing and delicious for the people you love?” –Michael Pollan
“To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” –Mahatma Gandhi
“When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families’ tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the lunchable.” –Barbara Kingsolver
“Our life is frittered away by detail — simplify, simplify.”-Henry David Thoreau
“Our deep respect for the land and its harvest is the legacy of generations of farmers who put food on our tables, preserved our landscape, and inspired us with a powerful work ethic.“ -James H. Douglas
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”-Henry David Thoreau
“The busy bee has no time for sorrow.” – William Blake
“The real things haven’t changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.”-Laura Ingalls Wilder
Homesteading Quotes: Weather and Superstitions
“The higher the clouds, the finer the weather.”
“When clouds appear like towers, the Earth is refreshed by frequent showers.”
“Ring around the moon? Rain real soon.”
“Plant in the Moonlight”
“Placing rusty nails or iron items in the garden when seeds are planted will help them grow.”
“If bees fly home and don’t return, rain is coming.”
“Anything planted by a pregnant woman is guaranteed to thrive.”
“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in morning, sailor’s warning.”
“Never raise 13 livestock of one species/breed.”
“A killing frost in September means there won’t be another frost until after the middle of October.”
“If nuts and berries remain on the trees after the leaves have fallen, it will be a hard winter.”
“Crops sown from north to south will grow better than crops sown east to west.”
Homesteading Quotes: Sustainability
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” -New England Proverb
“Refuse what you do not need; reduce what you do need; reuse what you consume; recycle what you cannot refuse, reduce, or reuse; and rot (compost) the rest.” -Bea Johnson
“Live gently upon this earth.” -Unknown
“Cutting food waste is a delicious way of saving money, helping to feed the world and protect the planet” -Tristram Stuart
“Food waste isn’t considered a problem because, for the most part, it isn’t considered at all. It’s easy to ignore because it’s both common and customary. I have yet to meet someone who is pro-food waste, but many aren’t convinced that it’s important” -Jonathan Bloom
“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.” – Robert Swan, Author
“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”– Native American Proverb
“We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.” – Thomas Fuller, Historian
“If it can’t be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled, or composted, then it should be restricted, designed or removed from production.” – Pete Seeger
“Becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species.” – Chris Hedges
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