Quotes About Simplicity

Today these four crops account for two thirds of the calories we eat. When you consider that humankind has historically consumed some eighty thousand edible species, and that three thousand of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the human diet. Why should this concern us? Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between fifty and a hundred different chemical compounds and elements in order to be healthy.

Here, then, is one way in which we would do well to go a little native: backward, or perhaps it is forward, to a time and place where the gathering and preparing and enjoying of food were closer to the center of a well-lived life.

We gardeners have always had trouble heeding Henry Ward Beecher's sound nineteenth-century advice, that we not be "made wild by pompous catalogs from florists and seedsmen.

The next Skylight sound bite goes like this: "We got barbecue, slaw, and cornbread, that's all," Samuel recites. "When you come here, it's not what you want, it's how much of it you need.

I realized that the answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated question of what we should eat wasn't so complicated after all, and in fact could be boiled down to just seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants

If we could hear the squirrel's heartbeat, the sound of the grass growing, we should die of that roar

I prized, too, the almost perfect transparency of this meal, the brevity and simplicity of the food chain that linked it to the wider world.

always living on less than you have and more lightly than you need to.

If you want to understand what an expanded consciousness looks like, all you have to do is have tea with a four-year-old.

antidotes to our abstraction.

For me, playing simply is dribbling. For me, playing one or two touches is harder. Playing simply is the most difficult thing.

I grew up poor. To me, interior decorating is my big-screen TV, my couch and my Simpsons poster.

I drive the same car that I've driven since I was 16. That's who I am.

It's very natural and simple to me, drawing, because I've drawn since I was a kid. It's just the most normal thing for me to do. And it's very meditative.

If you're gonna sing, sing 'em something they can understand.

I don't add any deliberate nuances to the way I sing. I've seen so much and been all over the world, but I'm glued to my roots, and that comes across.

To sing like a hillbilly, you had to have lived like a hillbilly. You had to have smelt a lot of mule manure.

I have a simple life. I mean, you just give me a drum roll, they announce my name, and I come out and sing. In my job I have a contract that says I'm a singer. So I sing.

I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer.

We of the soft-crooning radio type of singer are giving the people what they want. The American public as a whole does not care for full-throated operatic singing. And why should it? Down through the ages, it has been the simple song which has lived and continues to touch the heart of humanity. And so it is with singing.

I don't even possess a car. I ride in auto-rickshaws because I like to be a part of the masses. I don't want to single myself out as someone up and above.

When I'm not shooting, I don't wear much makeup. I just moisturize and maybe put on a berry-colored balm on my lips and cheeks, and then mascara - that's it. My face and hair gets abused every single day, so I try take it easy on off days.

I love clothes, but when it comes down to actually getting dressed, I usually just wear ZARA sweatshirts, jeans and the same pair of boots I've had for seven years, every single day of my life.

I had a wonderful mother who wanted my sister and me to have everything, even though money was a very prominent thing we didn't have. But we had a very happy childhood - pretty much ideal, in fact.