Quotes About Simplicity

I call it digital minimalism, and it applies the belief that less can be more to our relationship with digital tools.

You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?

more often than not, the cumulative cost of the noncrucial things we clutter our lives with can far outweigh the small benefits each individual piece of clutter promises.

Digital minimalism

Consider this quote from the coding prodigy Santiago Gonzalez describing his work to an interviewer: Beautiful code is short and concise, so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say, "oh, that's well written code." It's much like as if you were writing a poem.

The Amish, it turns out, do something that's both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.

In July, Thoreau moved into the cabin where he then lived for the next two years. In the book Walden, he wrote about this experience, famously describing his motivation as follows: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

It's instead quite natural once you recognize that the power of a general-purpose computer is in the total number of things it enables the user to do, not the total number of things it enables the user to do simultaneously.

Put another way: minimalists don't mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.

minimize the shallow in my life

Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item

They criticize me for harping on the obvious; if all the folks in the United States would do the few simple things they know they ought to do, most of our big problems would take care of themselves.

The best thing is to look natural, but it takes makeup to look natural.

Teach me the wilderness simplicity. Help me to point to you, honestly and joyously, as the threshold of all that really matters.

I much prefer it when things are straightforward. They don't have to be simple or easy, but they do have to be fair.

From the mouths of children and fools we will hear the truth spoken

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.

Paint the essential character of things.

On the hinder slope of the hill two little goatherds are tending a flock of goats; one of them is sitting on a rock whittling a crook out of ash, while the other is trying to coax a few tweets out of a reed flute.

Her idea had a beautiful simplicity at first.

Why did they have so many clothes, anyway? Life was so much easier in India, where a boy needed only a pair of shorts.

I repeat my motto: poco spero, nulla chiedo." Little I hope, nothing I ask.

SImplicity is focusing my attention on what I want to create and experience.

In her inspiring book The Not So Big Life, she says, "We need to remodel the way we are living, but not in a way that gives us more of the same kinds of space we already have; that would simply create an even bigger life. What we need is a remodeling that allows us to experience what's already here but to experience it differently, so that it delights us rather than drives us crazy." Even a small detail in a home