87 Quotes About Simple-living

I floundered over job listings and career discussions with headhunters, none of them appealing to me, the idea of going back to a nine-to-five job, crammed into subway cars like cattle, staring at spreadsheets all day with Micromanaging Marks and Type-A Taras hovering around me a soul-crushing prospect.

The more money you make, the more you spend on stupid stuff and the more you grow your life into something bigger, and that bigger life needs even more money. Ultimately you end up more stressed than when you started out. The trick is to live a small, simple life, but for some reason we aren’t built that way. We always want more. And it’s stupid.

Say what you mean,Mean what you say.

Forget about the money for a moment. Lose yourself in the wilderness, listen to the music of the softly blowing winds, feel the rain on your bare skin, let the mountains take the burden off your shoulders.

The simple life is an authentic life.

It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another.

Why do you have to develop? If economic growth rises from 5% to 10%, is happiness going to double? What's wrong with a growth rate of 0%? Isn't this a rather stable kind of economics? Could there be anything better than living simply and taking it easy?

When the living gets unburdened with needs and desires, the life becomes simple and easy to carry.

Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between.