49 Quotes About Minimalism

You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day. Charlotte Eriksson

Eyes blinded by the fog of thingscannot see truth. Ears deafened by the din of thingscannot hear truth. Brains bewildered by the whirl of thingscannot think truth. Hearts deadened by the weight of thingscannot feel truth. Throats choked by the dust of thingscannot speak truth. Harold Bell Wright

I get so god damn lonely and sad and filled with regrets some days. It overwhelms me as I’m sitting on the bus; watching the golden leaves from a window; a sudden burst of realisation in the middle of the night. I can’t help it and I can’t stop it. I’m alone as I’ve always been and sometimes it hurts…. but I’m learning to breathe deep through it and keep walking. I’m learning to make things nice for myself. To comfort my own heart when I wake up sad. To find small bits of friendship in a crowd full of strangers. To find a small moment of joy in a blue sky, in a trip somewhere not so far away, a long walk an early morning in December, or a handwritten letter to an old friend simply saying ”I thought of you. I hope you’re well.” No one will come and save you. No one will come riding on a white horse and take all your worries away. You have to save yourself, little by little, day by day. Build yourself a home. Take care of your body. Find something to work on. Something that makes you excited, something you want to learn. Get yourself some books and learn them by heart. Get to know the author, where he grew up, what books he read himself. Take yourself out for dinner. Dress up for no one but you and simply feel nice. it’s a lovely feeling, to feel pretty. You don’t need anyone to confirm it. I get so god damn lonely and sad and filled with regrets some days, but I’m learning to breathe deep through it and keep walking. I’m learning to make things nice for myself. Slowly building myself a home with things I like. Colors that calm me down, a plan to follow when things get dark, a few people I try to treat right. I don’t sometimes, but it’s my intent to do so. I’m learning. I’m learning to make things nice for myself. I’m learning to save myself. I’m trying, as I always will. . Charlotte Eriksson

Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of science. Pat Conroy

I never said it was easy to find your place in this world, but I’m coming to the conclusion that if you seek to please others, you will forever be changing because you will never be yourself, only fragments of someone you could be. You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day. That’s the natural order of this world. This is called the practice of detachment. Charlotte Eriksson

I have rooted myself into this quiet place where I don’t need much to get by. I need my visions. I need my books. I need new thoughts and lessons, from older souls, bars, whisky, libraries; different ones in different towns. I need my music. I need my songs. I need the safety of somewhere to rest my head at night, when my eyes get heavy. And I need space. Lots of space. To run, and sing, and change around in any way I please–outer or inner–and I need to love. I need the space to love ideas and thoughts; creations and people–anywhere I can find–and I need the peace of mind to understand it. Charlotte Eriksson

There's a fine line between minimalism and not trying very hard. Tom Pappalardo

I used to think of work as a bad word. Back in the corporate world, work was something that prevented me from living, something that kept me from feeling satisfied or fulfilled or passionate. Even the word itself carried with it a negative connotation. Work–bluck! When I left the corporate world, I swore off the word altogether. Noun, verb, adjective– I avoided all of work’s iterations. I no longer ‘went to work, ’ so that was easy to remove from my vocabulary. In fact, I no longer ‘worked’ at all; instead I replaced the word with a more specific verb: I would ‘write’ or ‘teach’ or ‘speak’ or ‘volunteer, ’ but I refused to ‘work.’ I no longer went to the gym to ‘workout’; instead I ‘exercised.’ And I stopped wearing ‘work clothes’; I chose instead to wear ‘dress clothes.’ And I avoided getting ‘worked up, ’ preferring to call it ‘stress’ or ‘anxiety.’ And I didn’t bring my car to the shop to get ‘worked on, ’ deciding instead to have my vehicle ‘repaired.’ Hell, I even avoided ‘handiwork’ 92 and ‘housework, ’ selecting their more banal alternatives. Suffice it to say, I wanted nothing to do with the word. I wanted it not only stricken from my lexicon, but from my memory, erasing every shred of the thing that kept me from pursuing my dream for over a decade. But after a year of that nonsense, I realized something: it wasn’t the word that was bad; it was the meaning I gave to the word. It took removing the word from my everyday speech for a year to discover that it wasn’t a bad word at all. During that year, I had been pursuing my dream, and guess what–when I looked over my shoulder at everything I’d accomplished, I realized that pursuing my dream was, in fact, a lot of work. It took a lot of work to grow a website. It took a lot of work to publish five books. It took a lot of work to embark on a coast-to-coast tour. It took a lot of work to teach my first writing class. It took a lot of work to pursue my dream. Work wasn’t the problem. What I did as my work was the problem. I wasn’t passionate about my work before–my work wasn’t my mission–and so I wanted to escape from work so I could live a more rewarding life, looking to balance out the tedium of the daily grind. But work and life don’t work that way. Even when you’re pursuing your dream, there will be times of boredom and stress and long stretches of drudgery. That’s alright. It’s all worth it in the end. When your work becomes your life’s mission, you no longer need a work-life balance. . Joshua Fields Millburn

This [sand-dollar hunting] had become one of our rituals together, and though she would search for other varieties of shells when I was out of town or unable to see her, she would wait until I appeared on her front porch before setting off to extract these mute delicate coins from their settings in the sand. At first, we had collected only the larger specimens, but gradually as we learned what was rare and to be truly prized, we began to gather only the smallest sand dollars for our collection. Our trophies were sometimes as small as thumbnails and as fragile as contact lenses. Annie Kate collected the tiniest relics, round and cruciform and white as bone china when dried of sea water, and placed them in a glass-and-copper cricket box in her bedroom. Often we would sit together and admire the modest splendor of our accumulation. At times it looked like the coinage of a shy, diminutive species of angel. Our quest to find the smallest sand dollar became a competition between us, and as the months passed and Annie Kate grew larger with the child, the brittle, desiccated animals we unearthed from the sand became smaller and smaller. It was all a matter of training the eye to expect less. Pat Conroy

If you cannot afford yourself any luxuries for the time being, at least offer yourself the one priceless luxury no one can take away from you — your time Lauren Klarfeld

To storm, a mind, it must be balanced, by what can't be it must be challenged... Will Advise

I am a worried person with a stressed out soul, living a simple life with no capital. Charlotte Eriksson

As an evil cultist, I make an excellent evil cultist. Only I'm stupid, and not evil. And I worship nothing, really. Will Advise

For awhile, I was left with nothing on the physical plane. I had no relationships, no job, no home, no socially defined identity. I spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy. Eckhart Tolle

A big group of daily friends or a white painted house with bills and mirrors, are not a necessity to me–but an intelligent conversation while sharing another coffee, is. Charlotte Eriksson

The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work. Ray Kurzweil

Minimalism is the constant art of editing your life. Danny Dover

While the people of Madrid seem to have resigned to selling almost anything - the one thing they have never given up on so far - is time. It is the one commodity that is never sold and always shared. Lauren Klarfeld

To find doesn't always require to search. Will Advise

The IdealThis is where I came from. I passed this way. This should not be shameful Or hard to say. A self is a self. It is not a screen. A person should respect What he has been. This is my past Which I shall not discard. This is the ideal. This is hard. James Fenton

Simplicity is complex. It's never simple to keep things simple. Simple solutions require the most advanced thinking. Richie Norton

So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian. Evelyn Waugh

...you need to assess what you love right now and what is authntic to your way of living in this season of life. Melissa Michaels

Your home is living space, not storage space. Francine Jay

O happiness! O happiness! Wilt thou perhaps sing, O my soul? Thou liest in the grass. But this is the secret, solemn hour, when no shepherd playeth his pipe. Take care! Hot noontide sleepeth on the fields. Do not sing! Hush! The world is perfect. Do not sing, thou prairie-bird, my soul! Do not even whisper! Lo–hush! The old noontide sleepeth, it moveth its mouth: doth it not just now drink a drop of happiness–– An old brown drop of golden happiness, golden wine? Something whisketh over it, its happiness laugheth. Thus–laugheth a God. Hush! "For happiness, how little sufficeth for happiness! " Thus spoke I once and thought myself wise. But it was a blasphemy: that have I now learned. Wise fools speak better. The least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye-glance–little maketh up the best happiness. Hush! . Friedrich Nietzsche

This is today! What will tomorrow bring? Life arrives and departs on its own schedule, not ours; it's time to travel light, and be ready to go wherever it takes us. Meg Wolfe

Write that novel, sail that boat. And if you can't, immerse yourself in the fantasy, be the ultimate dabbler, just enjoy what it is you enjoy. It'll help you get well if you're going to get well, and it'll help you sail that great boat in the sky if that's what's going to happen. Onwards and Upwards. No regrets. Meg Wolfe

It's not always that we need to do more but rather that we need to focus on less. Nathan W. Morris

Of course one’s sense of identification with the nation is inflected by all kinds of particulars, including one’s class, race, gender, and sexual identification. … But [regarding] national character …, aside from references to a national aesthetic – literary, musical, and choreographic, there are two poles I reference: minimalist and maximalist. I love them both – the cryptic poems of Emily Dickinson folded up in tiny packets and hidden away in a box, the sparse, understated choreographies of Merce; but also the “trashy, profane and obscene” poems of Whitman and Ginsberg, [and] Martha Graham’s expressionism. I am, myself, a minimalist. But I love distortion guitar and the wild exhibitionism of so many American artists. Also, these divisions are false. Emily Dickinson, in fact, can be as trashy and obscene as the best of them! Anyway, Dickinson and Whitman are at the heart of this narrative. They are the Dancing Queen and the Guitar Hero. Barbara Browning

...minimalism in the service of others is a logical extension of the same ethos of selflessness. Joshua Becker

One can with but moderate possessions do what one ought. Aristotle

My goal is no longer to get more done, but rather to have less to do. Francine Jay

There’s been a lot written on the topic of minimalism. But I still believe in it. Ryan Lilly

Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off. Coco Chanel

If you have clutter in your real life, your tangible life, then it really adds to the emotional clutter in your mind. Giuliana Rancic

Real luxury is not working like a maniac to take an expensive vacation--it is living a life you enjoy every day. Kathy Gottberg

To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified. William James

The first step in crafting the life you want is to get rid of everything you don't. Joshua Becker

Owning less is better than organizing more. Joshua Becker

A fast is not necessarily something we offer God, but it assists us in offering ourselves Jen Hatmaker

Make art and live simply. Shawn Lukas

Simplicity is all but nothing that's there. Shawn Lukas