Top 15 Fritjof Capra Quotes

Organizations need to undergo fundamental changes, both in order to adapt to the new business environment and to become ecologically sustainable.

One of the key insights of the systems approach has been the realization that the network is a pattern that is common to all life. Wherever we see life, we see networks.

These, then, are some of the basic principles of ecology—interdependence, recycling, partnership, flexibiility, diversity, and, as a consequence of all those, sustainability ...the survival of humanity will depend on our ecological literacy, on our ability to understand these principles of ecology and live accordingly.

A diverse community is a resilient community, capable of adapting to changing situations.

The principle of flexibility... suggests a corresponding strategy of conflict resolution. ...the community will need stability and change, order and freedom, tradition and innovation. ...these unavoidable conflicts are much better resolved by establishing a dynamic balance.

Lack of flexibility manifests itself as stress. ...stress will occur when one or more variables of the system are pushed to their extreme values, which induces increased rigidity throughout the system.

Economics emphasizes competition, expansion, and domination; ecology emphasizes cooperation, conservation, and partnership.

Partnership—the tendency to associate, establish links, live inside one another, and cooperate—is one of the hallmarks of life.

The so-called free market does not provide consumers with proper information, because the social and environmental costs of production are not part of the current economic models. ...an ecological tax reform would be strictly revenue neutral, shifting the tax burden from income taxes to "eco-taxes." …the taxes would be added to existing products, forms of energy, services, and materials, so that prices would better reflect true costs.

A major clash between economics and ecology derives from the fact that nature is cyclical, whereas our industrial systems are linear. Our businesses take resources, transform them into products plus waste, and sell the products to consumers, who discard more waste...

Understanding ecological interdependence means understanding relationships. It requires the shifts of perception that are characteristic of systems thinking—from the parts to the whole, from objects to relationships, from contents to patterns. ...Nourishing the community means nourishing those relationships.

There is no self-awareness in ecosystems, no language, no consciousness, and no culture; and therefore no justice and democracy; but also no greed or dishonesty.

The Buddhist doctrine of impermanence includes the notion that there is no self... It holds that the idea of a separate, individual self is an illusion, just another form of maya, an intellectual concept that has no reality. To cling to this idea of a separate self leads to the same pain and suffering (duhkha) as the adherence to any other fixed category of thought.

With the subsequent strong support from cybernetics, the concepts of systems thinking and systems theory became integral parts of the established scientific language, and led to numerous new methodologies and applications - systems engineering, systems analysis, systems dynamics, and so on.

Before the 1940s the terms "system" and "systems thinking" had been used by several scientists, but it was Bertalanffy's concepts of an open system and a general systems theory that established systems thinking as a major scientific movement