Literary quotes on simplicity

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Started 11 months ago by eternalvoyageur
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eternalvoyageur
Member

"Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with
only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two
friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat,
a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little
more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

You will find the boat easier to pull then, and it will not be so liable
to upset, and it will not matter so much if it does upset; good, plain
merchandise will stand water. You will have time to think as well as to
work. Time to drink in life's sunshine - time to listen to the AEolian
music that the wind of God draws from the human heart-strings around us."

--- Jerome K Jerome

Now you, add any you find fit.

Posted 11 months ago #
camellia tree
Member

“To live content with small means;
to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion;
to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich;
to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart;
to study hard;
to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never;
in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common –

this is my symphony.”

–William Henry Channing (1810-1884)

Posted 11 months ago #
JuliaJayne
Member

We don’t need to increase our goodsnearly as much as we need to scale down our wants.
Not wanting something is as good as possessing it.

~Donald Horban~

Posted 11 months ago #
ArtGal
Member

"How many things are there which I do not want."
-Socrates

Posted 11 months ago #
Sky
Member

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.”

Henry David Thoreau

Posted 11 months ago #
Ella
Member

“Old Earth is the doting mother of a wide, wild brood: and in her eye, her children
all are equal. She loves the way her seedlings struggle up the cliff; she loves the avalanche that scours the ledges clean again. She builds her white-tailed deer with ardent care; she fashions rows of teeth for her beloved wolf. Be warned: the privilege of loving everything is hers alone. Don’t take it for yourself. We live below her in the realm of necessary choice. Our collars or our lives can pinch. We take the wrong job or the wrong trail; we know a thousand ways to die of thirst. We have to choose. We have to learn what we can bear to love.

Watch Earth spin out her images – her owls, her rivers, towns, and mountains. Stand back awhile before you choose. Too big a farm can kill a man – as good as kill him, anyway, with chores and money. Stand aside. Don’t take anything that you can’t feel. It may surprise you just how little fills a landscape or a life. Take a single maple on a drifted hill. Take a small house, a woodsmoke curl, a roll of hills unfolding to the north. Take the full moon of December. See if it’s not enough to last a lifetime.”

– Stephen Harvard

Posted 11 months ago #
startsmart
Member

Mildred Lisette Norman wrote, "Anything you cannot relinquish, when it has outlived its usefulness, possesses you. And in this materialistic age, a great many of us are possessed by our possessions."

(I of course got this from Criminal Minds, one of my favorite shows!)

Posted 11 months ago #
lucy1965
Member

“Renunciation is not giving up the things of the world, but accepting that they go away.” ~Shunryu Suzuki

Posted 11 months ago #
lucy1965
Member

"What is 'room' -- is it only a piece of space? . . . Tangible or intangible, either you keep a thing or you give it. We find it safer to give it."

"Keeping grows; giving flows."

Both by Ursula Le Guin, from Always Coming Home

Posted 11 months ago #
JuliaJayne
Member

I'm currently reading 'The Art of Happiness, A Handbook for Living'.
Authors: His Holiness The Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler M.D.

"we don't need more money, we don't need greater success or fame, we don't need the perfect body or even the perfect mate. - right now, at this very moment, we have a mind, which is all the basic equipment we need to achieve complete happiness."

"

Posted 10 months ago #
rutheverhart
Member

What a great thread! At the risk of sounding like the preacher I am . . .

Your life does not consist in the abundance of your possessions. ~Jesus of Nazareth (Luke 12:15)

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. ~Jesus of Nazareth (Matthew 6:19-21)

Posted 10 months ago #
susanintexas
Member

Perhaps not quite simplicity, but . .

"My other piece of advice, Copperfield, said Mr. Micawber, you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

and

"Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes." -- Mark Twain

Posted 10 months ago #
rutheverhart
Member

Susan, that Twain quote is one of my favorites. It is really true.

Posted 10 months ago #
Ella
Member

Yes, it's one of my favorites, too. Though I suppose it shouldn't apply to a new wardrobe required by weight loss :)

According to my Bartlett's, the quote is from Thoreau's "Walden." And here I had always thought it was from Emerson!

Posted 10 months ago #
lovedbyall
Member

Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.” — Oscar Wilde

Blessings to All!

Posted 10 months ago #
phnxpete
Member

Another Henry David Thoreau

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

Posted 10 months ago #
Ella
Member

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another." - Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924)

Posted 9 months ago #
snosie
Member

ruth, I read that today in church, in a pew sheet left over from Wednesday - I'm still struggling with that, and you can't serve two masters.

Posted 9 months ago #
recycler
Member

These aren't literary (assuming literary means "from literature"), but I find them inspiring anyway:

"To have what you want is riches, to be able to do without is power."
-- George MacDonald

"If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things."
-- Albert Einstein

"When you can't have what you want, it's time to start wanting what you have."
-- Kathleen A. Sutton

"Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get."
-- Dale Carnegie

Posted 9 months ago #
lucy1965
Member

I think this one should be posted in the header for ATAD:

"A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules." - Anthony Trollope

Posted 9 months ago #

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