Quotes About Simplicity

The function of a university is to teach a [person] how to drink tea, not because anything is important, but because it is usual to drink tea, or for that matter anything else under the sun. And whatever you do, every act, however small, can teach you everything, provided you see who is acting." ? Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton On Prayer

The simple, chaste lines of a monastic Church, built perhaps by unskilled hands in the wilderness, may well say infinitely more in praise of God than the pretentious enormities of costly splendor that are erected to be looked at rather than to be prayed in.

If what most people take for granted were really true—if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now.

The poorest man in a religious community is not necessarily the one who has the fewest objects assigned to him for his use. Poverty is not merely a matter of not having things. It is an attitude which leads us to renounce some of the advantages which come from the use of things.

Fishes are born in water Man is born in Tao. If fishes, born in water, Seek the deep shadow Of pond and pool, All their needs Are satisfied. If man, born in Tao, Sinks into the deep shadow Of non-action To forget aggression and concern, He lacks nothing His life is secure. Moral: "All the fish needs Is to get lost in water. All man needs is to get lost In Tao.

kind of prayer we here speak of as properly "monastic" (though it may also fit into the life of any lay person who is attracted to it) is a prayer of silence, simplicity, contemplative and meditative unity, a deep personal integration in an attentive, watchful listening of "the heart.

The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary everyday routine.

The tighter you squeeze the less you have.

There is a monastic outlook which is common to all those who have elected to question the value of a life submitted entirely to arbitrary secular presuppositions, dictated by social convention, and dedicated to the pursuit of temporal satisfactions which are perhaps only a mirage. Whatever may be the value of life in the world there have been, in all cultures, men who have claimed to find something they vastly prefer in solitude. (p. 10)

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender oneself to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. It destroys one's own capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of one's own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes the work fruitful.

Nourished by the Sacraments and formed by the prayer and teaching of the Church, we need seek nothing but the particular place willed for us by God within the Church. When we find that place, our life and our prayer both at once become extremely simple.

Learn to live small and you will discover great pleasures. You will accomplish more in your life than you could ever predict if you were overly ambitious.

I believe that one day we'll understand that we've lost out on religion because we made it too lofty and distant. I see it as a simple quality of everyday life, and in that simplicity lie its beauty and importance.

She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as 'pretty'… but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.

For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories, and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world's affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence.

Men had it so simple. When it wasn't about Sticking It In, it was about Having The Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance.

Don't commit original sin. Try and let her just be.

Here was world of simplicity and certainty no acidhead, no revolutionary anarchist would ever find, a world based on the one and zero of life and death. Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of life and deaths...

makeup supposed to look like no makeup or whatever

Nothing is more complex than avoiding the obvious

Before an explanation can be too simple, it must first be wrong.

Before an explanation can be too simple, it must first be wrong. But often the fact that some explanation seems too simple becomes a substitute for showing that it is wrong.

lthough the basic principles of economics are not very complicated, the very ease with which they can be learned also makes them easy to dismissed as simplistic by those who do not want to accept analyses which contradict their cherished beliefs. Evasions of the obvious are often far more complicated than the facts. Nor is it automatically true that complex effects must have complex causes. The ramifications of something very simple can become enormously complex.

What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful.