Quotes About Simplicity

Song of the Builders On a summer morning I sat down on a hillside to think about God— a worthy pastime. Near me, I saw a single cricket; it was moving the grains of the hillside this way and that way. How great was its energy, how humble its effort. Let us hope it will always be like this, each of us going on in our inexplicable ways building the universe.

Impossible to believe we need so much as the world wants us to buy. I have more clothes, lamps, dishes, paper clips than I could possibly use before I die. Oh, I would like to live in an empty house, with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass. No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass. And I suppose sometime I will. Old and cold I will lie apart from all this buying and selling, with only the beautiful earth in my heart.

PERCY (NINE) Your friend is coming I say to Percy, and name a name and he runs to the door, his wide mouth in its laugh-shape, and waves, since he has one, his tail. Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart. How would it be to be Percy, I wonder, not thinking, not weighing anything, just running forward.

I have been thinking about living like the lilies that blow in the fields. They rise and fall in the wedge of the wind, and have no shelter from the tongues of the cattle, and have no closets or cupboards, and have no legs. Still I would like to be as wonderful as that old idea. But if I were a lily I think I would wait all day for the green face of the hummingbird to touch me. What I mean is, could I forget myself even in those feathery fields?

Among the things I learned in those years were two of special interest to poets. First, that one can rise early in the morning and have time to write (or, even, to take a walk and then write) before the world's work schedule begins. Also, that one can live simply and honorably on just about enough money to keep a chicken alive. And do so cheerfully.

I know a lot of fancy words. I tear them from my heart and my tongue. Then I pray.

I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.

Every year the hatchlings wake in the swaying branches, in the silver baskets, and love the world. Is it necessary to say any more? Have you heard them singing in the wind, above the final fields? Have you ever been so happy in your life?

But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,     to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly; for example—I think this     as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch— the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the     daisies for the field.

Come with me to visit the sunflowers, they are shy but want to be friends;

turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city- turned away forever from the factories, the personal strivings, to a life of the imagination.

As I grew older the things I cared about grew fewer, but were more important. ... Things! Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful fire! More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing - the reason they can fly.

This morning the water lilies are no less lovely, I think, than the lilies of Monet. And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead children out of the fields into the text of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.

Butterflies don't write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn't mean they don't know, in their own way, what they are. That they don't know they are alive—that they don't feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world.

Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

and easily she adored every blossom, not in the serious, careful way that we choose this blossom or that blossom— the way we praise or don't praise— the way we love or don't love— but the way we long to be— that happy in the heaven of earth— that wild, that loving.

the faint-pink roses that have never been improved, but come to bud then open like little soft sighs

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

The television has two instruments that control it. I get confused. The washer asks me, do you want regular or delicate? Honestly, I just want clean. Everything is like that. I won't even mention cell phones. I can turn on the light of the lamp beside my chair Where a book is waiting, but that's about it. Oh yes, and I can strike a match and make fire.

Every summer I gather a few stones from the beach and keep them in a glass bowl. Now and again I cover them with water, and they drink. There's no question about this; I put tinfoil over the bowl, tightly, yet the water disappears. This doesn't mean we ever have a conversation, or that they have the kind of feelings we do, yet it might mean something. Whatever the stones are, they don't lie in the water and do nothing.

Today I'm flying low and I'm not saying a word. I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The way I'd like to go on living in this world wouldn't hurt anything, I'd just go on walking uphill and downhill, looking around, and so what if half the time I don't know what for —

What good does it do to lie all day in the sun loving what is easy?

As I grew older the things I cared about grew fewer, but were more important.