Quotes About Simplicity

Delighted of course. It will only be a very scratch meal—just the sandwich crusts and broken meringue-shells and what's left over. Yes, isn't it a perfect morning?

La felicidad, pensó, está hecha de pequeñas cosas. Siempre se la espera con mayúsculas, pero llega a nosotros de puntillas y puede pasar bajo nuestras narices sin darnos cuenta

Transformation often begins with what we're willing to subtract from our lives, rather than what we're trying to add.

He put his hand in his pocket and found the porte-bonheur, still warm. He looked back at the pier. The one-eyed cat waited. All at once, Henri Beauchamp spun on his heels and stretched his arms wide to the morning sky. It didn't matter, did it, what Jack was? It only mattered that he loved him.

For many people religion can be so easy they stumble right over it.

Small pleasures. Don't ever dismiss them, Ellen thinks. Tastes, smells, the feel of things, the sounds of birds, music. And talk. Small conversations with people you like. A good book.

Life is easier than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable.

In choosing a bare bones existence, we are enriched, and can redefine success as an internal process rather than an outward display of wealth and power.

An old woman I know who has lived all her life on ranches here and rarely complains about deprivations (she raised a family with no electricity or running water, and can remember winnowing wheat by hand with blankets in the 1920s because her family could not afford to hire a threshing machine and crew) once said to me, "The one thing I could never stand was the wind.

Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York, a place on the plains that I love, a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles, she asked, "But what is there to see?" The answer, of course, is nothing. Land, sky, and the ever-changing light.

I could suddenly grasp that not ever having to think about what to wear was freedom, that a drastic stripping down to essentials in one's dress might also be a drastic enrichment of one's ability to focus on more important things.

In many ways, airplane travel mimics the asceticism of the early desert monks: a limited and uncomfortable physical space in which to sit, limited availability of water, food that is less than appetizing, small chance of getting much sleep.

I have found therapy to be of limited usefulness, constrained in ways that religion is not, because it consistently falls short of mystery, by which I mean a profound simplicity that allows for paradox and poetry. In therapy I am likely to be searching for explanations, causes, and definitions, information that will help me change my behavior in healthful ways. But wisdom is the goal of spiritual seeking, and it is religion's true home.

There is nothing more difficult than simplicity,' Madame

There is nothing more difficult than simplicity,' Madame added, turning her back on them. 'And therefore, nothing more refined.

There are no elegant potatoes.

Reduce the complexities of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life will reduce themselves. Teale

Some people think what you're supposed to do in life is fill yourself up with loads of things like names, the more the better. But that's not how it works.

It was the small things she took pleasure in. The faint hum of a huge furry bumble bee busily flitting from one flower to another, oblivious to the fact that it was completing a task on which the entire human race depended.

It really depends, but, generally speaking, just because of the mechanics of it, voice-over is easier because there is no hair, no makeup, no wardrobe, no fittings, no line memorizing. You don't have to me woken up in Russia at 6 in the morning and go film a scene. It's just easier on the body, the family life to do voice-overs.

That's probably what attracted me to archaeology. No makeup, no fluffing or mousseing. Every day is casual Friday. Less than casual.

Meaning and purpose come not from accomplishing great things in the world, but simply from loving those who are right in front of you, doing all you can with what you have, in the time you have, in the place where you are.

One thing we've learned this summer is that a house is not an end in itself, any more than "home" is just one geographic location where things feel safe and familiar. Home can be anyplace in which we create our own sense of rest and peace as we tend to the spaces in which we eat and sleep and play. It is a place that we create and re-create in every moment, at every stage of our lives, a place where the plain and common becomes cherished and the ordinary becomes sacred.

Words are shallow troughs for the deep water of the mind and it is only the fierce, the living, the simple, the clear, the angry mind which can overflow the troughs and go out over the mud, and over the grass, bearing the light of the sun on it like an angry shield.