Quotes About Simplicity

Indeed, until one tries it for himself, it is incredible what dignity there is in an old hat, what virtue in a time-worn coat, and how savory the dinner-table can be made without sirloin steaks and cranberry tarts.

I will be the gladdest thing Under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers And not pick one. I will look at cliffs and clouds With quiet eyes, Watch the wind bow down the grass, And the grass rise. And when lights begin to show Up from the town, I will mark which must be mine, And then start down!

Si ahora están en silencio, si ahora en ese silencio están interrogándose, si no quiebran ese silencio en el que están interrogandose con una sonrisa muda, es porque nada los retiene allí salvo eso, salvo estar sencillamente el uno frente al otro, dejando pasar el tiempo sin más objeto que tenerse cerca, y eso es lo bello de estar en silencio interrogándose

La vida es mucho más sencilla que esa lógica binaria de varitas mágicas que abren los ojos y conectan los corazones.

When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense

Beyond the wall of the unreal city ... there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it.

What ideal, immutable Platonic cloud could equal the beauty and perfection of any ordinary everyday cloud floating over, say, Tuba City, Arizona, on a hot day in June?

I am pleased enough with the surfaces - in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child's hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of a friend or lover, the silk of a girl's thigh, the sunlight on the rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind - what else is there? What else do we need?

My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do NOTHING - and find it enough.

If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.

So I lived alone. The first thing I did was take off my pants. Naturally.

I thought of the wilderness we had left behind us, open to sea and sky, joyous in its plenitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one.

I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring

For chrissake folks what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not?

The more I dim my eyes over print and frazzle my brain over abstract ideas, the more I appreciate the delight of being basically an animal wrapped in a sensitive skin: sex, the resistance of rock, the taste and touch of snow, the feel of the sun, good wine and a rare beefsteak and the company of friends around a fire with a guitar and lousy old cowboy songs. Despair: I'll never be a scholar, never be a decent good Christian. Just a hedonist, a pagan, a primitive romantic

Let our people travel light and free on their bicycles—nothing on the back but a shirt, nothing tied to the bike but a slicker, in case of rain. Their

The itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things. Let them and leave them alone--they'll survive for a few more thousand years, more or less, without any glorification from us.

There is something about the desert.… There is something there which the mountains, no matter how grand and beautiful, lack; which the sea, no matter how shining and vast and old, does not have.

But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.

Look here, I want to say, for godsake folks get out of them there machines, take off those fucking sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs, look around; throw away those goddamned idiotic cameras! For chrissake folks what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare?

Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and brush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock.

Space and scarcity give us dignity. And liberty. And thereby beauty.