Quotes About Simplicity

But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favourite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?

Parla come magni,' It means, 'Speak the way you eat,' or in my personal translation: 'Say it like you eat it.' It's a reminder - when you're making a big deal out of explaining something, when you're searching for the right words - to keep your language as simple and direct as Roman rood. Don't make a big production out of it. Just lay it on the table.

Il bel far niente means 'the beauty of doing nothing'... [it] has always been a cherished Italian ideal. The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life's achievement. You don't necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either.

the beauty of doing nothing

Being content with what you have already is an art form that leads to a peace that can't be replaced by anything else.

Not making a living,' he wrote, on his first trip to Alaska, 'just living.

In the end, what i have come to believe about God is simple. It's like this - I used to have this really great dog. She came from the pound. She was a mixture of about ten different breeds, but seemed to have inherited the finest features of them all. She was brown. When people asked me, What kind of dog is that? I would always give the same answer: She's a brown dog. Similarly, when the question is raised, What kind of God do you believe in? my answer is easy: I believe in a magnificent God.

writers like Jack Kerouac (who called himself an urban Thoreau) set forth to redefine and rediscover ways to live in America without slogging through what Kerouac called the endless system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume...

What does any of that have to do with the quiet glory of merely making things, and then sharing those things with an open heart and no expectations?

I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent—and working at a pace so slow—that I would be able to hear myself living.

A sage Portuguese sailor who had told him, years before 'To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.

There's another wonderful Italian expression: l'arte d'arrangiarsi-the art of making something out of nothing. The art of turning a few simple ingredients into a feast,or a few gathered friends into a festival. Anyone with a talent of happiness can do this, not only the rich.

Keep in mind that for most of history people just made things, and they didn't make such a big freaking deal out of it.

Cease partiicipation, if only for one day this year --- if only to make sure that we don't lose forever the rare and vanishing human talent of appreciating ease.

1950s. It was on the rooftop of our little bridal boutique that I learned this truth: when women are gathered together with no men around, they don't have to be anything in particular; they can just be.

The unnecessary and superfluous volume of pure beauty around here is not to be believed. I can pick papayas and bananas right off the trees outside my bedroom window. There's a cat who lives here who is enormously affectionate to me for half an hour everyday before I feed him, then moans crazily the rest of the time likes he's having Vietnam war flashbacks. Oddly, I don't mind this. I don't mind anything these days. I can't imagine or remember discontent.

when women are gathered together with no men around, they don't have to be anything in particular; they can just be.

He tells me that there are many ways to find God but most are too complicated for Westerners, so he will teach me an easy meditation. Which goes, essentially, like this: sit in silence and smile. I love it. He's laughing even as he's teaching it to me. Sit and smile. Perfect.

Look how little I need, Prudence seemed to be saying. Behold my goodness.

don't have to be anything in particular; they can just be.

of the 1950s. It was on the rooftop of our little bridal boutique that I learned this truth: when women are gathered together with no men around, they don't have to be anything in particular; they can just be.

I would like never to travel again. I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent—and working at a pace so slow—that I would be able to hear myself living.

Why have I been chasing happiness my whole life when bliss was here the entire time?

doing nothing but eating pasta