Quotes About Simplicity

It should be so simple. You do what you can while he is awake, and then once he is asleep, you do what you can only when he is asleep, beginning with the most important thing. But it is not so simple.

So what I think at this point is that I'm aiming too high, that maybe nothing is too much, to begin with. Maybe for now I should just try, each day, to be a little less than I usually am.

For a moment it seemed incomprehensible to me that anyone would build a whole city when all that was needed was a room for her.

Art is not in some far-off place.

Ouça, Virgínia, é preciso amar o inútil. Criar pombos sem pensar em comê-los, plantar roseiras sem pensar em colher as rosas, escrever sem pensar em publicar, fazer coisas assim, sem esperar nada em troca. A distância mais curta entre dois pontos pode ser a linha reta, mas é nos caminhos curvos que se encontram as melhores coisas.

Children and fools speak true.

Don't be fooled by strength you can see," he said at last. "Yahweh often hides His power in the simple things, the weak things, and so His strength seems foolish in man's eyes.

I can't think of anything that means less to me than money; it's too easy to come by.

All I want to do is go on with the unbridled life I lead here: barefoot, my faded bathing suit, an old jacket, lots of garlic, and swimming at all hours of the day. —COLETTE, AT SIXTY

Sometimes I think we forget that we're meant to pick up and go when the well runs dry [...] You stay put for too long, you get weighed down by things, things you don't need. It's true. Then your life becomes this pathetic accumulation of stuff. Emotional and physical junk.

They looked for one another when nothing else was happening, the way you pick up a magazine or look in the cupboard for a snack. Not exactly by accident and not exactly on purpose. You could go out in the world and do new things and meet new people, and then you could come home and just sit on the stoop with someone you had never not known, and watch lightning bugs blink on and off.

I want things plain. Or direct. When I read a book I'm suspicious of description. Too much embellishment or an excess of adjectives bothers me, as if the speaker or writer were attempting to overcome me, to finesse me like a bridge player. Or to seduce me.

When you let go of trying to get more of what you don't really need, it frees up oceans of energy to make a difference with what you have.

When we are focused constantly on the next thing—the next dress, the next car, the next job, the next vacation, the next home improvement—we hardly experience the gifts of that which we have now.

In our relationship with money, more is better distracts us from living more mindfully and richly with what we have.

The custom of confession seemed designed to encourage sin by granting ready forgiveness. Neither Abigail nor any member of her family ever wavered in their preference for life in America over life in Europe. In France they lived far grander style than they ever lived in Braintree. ...her unshakable belief was that America was superior to Europe - superiority based on simplicity, its supposed lack of extreme wealth and class distinctions, its religion and its emphasis on family

Finally, I went to my husband. "Honey," I said, feeling the entanglements of expectations loosening their grip on me, "I can't do everything good wives seem to do. But I can do three things. So, tell me your top three things, and I will do those well." After all, I could spend a whole marriage doing a hundred things halfway with a bitter attitude and an overwhelmed spirit. Or, I could do three things wholeheartedly with a smile on my face and love in my heart.

Jesus doesn't participate in the rat race. He's into the slower rhythms of life, like abiding, delighting, and dwelling — all words that require us to trust Him with our place and our pace.

And honestly, I'm tired of knowing I have issues but having no clue how to rein them in on a given day. I need something simple. A quick reality check I can remember in the midst of the everyday messies.

Relationships nourish us in ways nothing else can. It's the relationships that help unrush us. Relationships can complicate things. But they also have the power to force us into a much simpler rhythm.

Move forward. And determine not to make it all so complicated.

And that's when it occurred to me that if you get desperate enough you'll go all in with living slow for a while. You'll quiet down all the outside noise so God's voice can become the loudest voice in your life. Now, I realize, none of us can just quit life when life falls apart. But we can quit some things.

The fascination of trifles obscures the good," says the Wise Man. It is difficult in the midst of much doing and seeing to keep alive and present to the deepest reality, to the really real. And so the monk goes apart…

The royal road to a Nobel Prize has generally been through the reductionist approach,