Quotes About Simplicity

We will be more successful in all our endeavors if we can let go of the habit of running all the time, and take little pauses to relax and re-center ourselves. And we'll also have a lot more joy in living.

Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium - we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid?

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.

He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.

Elegance is achieved when all that is superfluous has been discarded and the human being discovers simplicity and concentration: the simpler and more sober the posture, the more beautiful it will be.

Living and working for four decades in a Bologna apartment and studio he shared with his unwed sisters, Morandi painted little but bottles, boxes, jars, and vases. Yet like that of Chardin and the underappreciated William Nicholson, Morandi's work seems to slow down time and show you things you've never seen before.

You hear a Willie Nelson solo, he doesn't play real fast, but it's so melodic and beautiful. It's kind of, to be human is to have space and not show all your stuff all the time.

If I've gone to the market on Saturday, and I go another time on Tuesday, then I'm really prepared. I can cook a little piece of fish; I can wilt some greens with garlic; I can slice tomatoes and put a little olive oil on. It's effortless.

I didn't set out to win Olympic medals, to play at UConn, to play in the WNBA. I just loved to play basketball. It's really very simple. Then when you start thinking about those other things, that's when thinking gets complicated.

I'm a person that doesn't have that many goals or plans. I feel like I'm the wind and I blow through life; it's whatever comes to me. I very much respect nature. Whatever happens to me, I'm happy and I embrace it.

I could happily lean on a gate all the livelong day, chatting to passers-by about the wind and the rain. I do a lot of gate-leaning while I am supposed to be gardening; instead of hoeing, I lean on the gate, stare at the vegetable beds and ponder.

When you try to communicate too many ideas, sometimes you wind up communicating nothing.

The wind can be quite extreme in England. We are not familiar with that in Germany, and you have to keep things simple.

The simple life on the farm was everything to me. Nothing was more relaxing after a long plane flight than to reach the winding driveway that led up to my house. The quiet of the night was more soothing than a sleeping pill.

To look out of a car in Scania, you see a painting on the horizontal - one windmill, one tiny farmhouse, acres of beet or grass.

I'm very, very lazy. I love to sit in a chair and look out the window and do nothing.

If you clean it up, get analytical, all the subtle joy and emotion you felt in the first place goes flying out the window.

I've lived in small rooms, flats, growing plants in pots on window sills. I'd have liked to have had a full-fledged garden with all kinds of flowers and plants. I've never had enough money to buy a big enough garden space.

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

Embrace the faff. Stare out of the window. Bend paperclips. Stand in the middle of the room trying to remember what you came downstairs for. Pace. Drum your fingertips. Move papers around. Hum. Look at the garden.

I have bougainvillea and a magnolia tree outside my window. Not that anything will ever beat the view I had from my desk window in my little farmhouse in Nebraska. Just a dirt road stretching out as far as you could see, with prairie grass on either side.

I grew up surrounded by two farms and their fields. My earliest memories are of our mongrel dog running around and cows looking in the window while we ate our tea.

When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It's better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers.

I admire Brian Eno so much in how he seems to push the idea of less being more - his touch is to crack open a window and let the light in.