Quotes About Simplicity

I do not have AC, TV, microwave or a washing machine in my house.

Our life before moving to Washington was filled with simple joys... Saturdays at soccer games, Sundays at grandma's house... and a date night for Barack and me was either dinner or a movie, because as an exhausted mom, I couldn't stay awake for both.

Bend like a willow. You made it sound so simple." "It was simple." "Indeed. I bent and changed everything. This is going to have consequences.

Since we're being literal now, have you felt clear and sensible at other times during your travels?' The question startled Tess into thinking. 'While turning hay. Swimming in the river, crawling through caves… once I was lying under a cattle guard, eating bread, and the sky was blue and there was a bee—' She cut off, embarrassed. It was hard to explain about the bee.

She owns all these nice condos, but she lives in an apartment. Go figure. She calls herself a minimalist, preferring a simple life to one "cluttered with materialistic objects that serve no purpose other than to provide a place for dust to gather." Her words, not mine. But you gotta love someone who sees dusting and scrubbing as a poor use of one's time. "I've never seen a headstone inscribed 'May she rest in peace. She kept a clean house.

If we all only owned the things we needed! You don't understand the nature of desire.

People go through life trying to please some audience. But once you realize there's no audience, life is simple. It's just doing what you know in your gut is right.

You're American," she said simply. "You think straightforwardness is a virtue.

T]ime is more purely hers if she squanders it and keeps it empty, holds it, feels it pass by, and resists filling it with anything that might put some too-useful dent in its open, airy emptiness.

And there you were," he said. "In your cotton-underweared splendor.

And hearing him, Stephen found herself thinking that all men had something simple about them; something that took pleasure in the things that were blameless, that longed, as it were, to contact Nature.

The abundance of the children's room must be every parent's or child's worst nightmare. "I'm bored." "I've got nothing to play with"—even though the shelves are full to the brim. Dust-collectors, a useless mess. Where is the love for the teddy bear, the doll, the car? The present which was given in love and did not drown in abundance is hard to find. The child does not need the toys—the toy factories need the child.15

Who has no house now will not build him one.

We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.

Mark Twain said on one occasion, "It is not those parts of scripture that are hard to understand that most disturb me, but those parts that are so clear!

There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence

At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back.

It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.

To be simple is to be great

Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?

I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.