Best 133 quotes in «minimalism quotes» category

Is the Life You’re Living Worth the Price You’re Paying to Live It?

I strive for simplicity and believe simplicity is beauty.

It is important to note that we don't think that sentimental items are bad or evil or that holding on to them is wrong. We don't. Rather, we think the pernicious nature of sentimental items – and overt sentimentality in general – is far more subtle. If you want to get rid of an item but the only reason you are holding on to it is for sentimental reasons – if it is weighing on you, if it's an anchor – then perhaps it's time to get rid of it, perhaps it is time to free yourself of the weight.

It is often the job of the advert to highlight the product’s strengths and the target audience’s weaknesses.

It’s 100% easier to increase your time and freedom by eliminating the dumb things you do every day than to try to be 100% more productive doing more dumb things.

It’s one that is stripped of the unnecessary, to make room for that which gives you joy. It’s a removal of clutter in all its forms, leaving you with peace and freedom and lightness. A minimalist eschews the mindset of more, of acquiring and consuming and shopping, of bigger is better, of the burden of stuff. A minimalist instead embraces the beauty of less, the aesthetic of spareness, a life of contentedness in what we need and what makes us truly happy. A minimalist realizes that acquiring stuff doesn’t make us happy. That earning more and having more are meaningless. That filling your life with busy-ness and freneticism isn’t desirable, but something to be avoided. A minimalist values quality, not quantity, in all forms.

It's better to have extra time on your hands and extra money in your pocket than extra stuff in your closet.

Minimalism is the new extra mile.

Mi resi conto che il valore degli oggetti di cui ho goduto da sola è decisamente minore del valore degli oggetti che mi ricordano i bei momenti trascorsi insieme agli altri.

Minimalism is really about reassessment of priorities, so you can remove unnecessary thigns from your life; get rid of things like possessions, activities, and relationships that do not improve or bring value to your life.

Minimalism is the constant art of editing your life.

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

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.

One underappreciated benefit of minimalism is the ability to walk confidently through your bedroom with the lights off.

Our excessive possessions are not making us happy. Even worse, they are taking us away from the things that do. Once we let go of the things that don't matter, we are free to pursue all the things that really do matter.

Out of calmness comes clarity.

It's no accident that most ads are pitched to people in their 20s and 30s. Not only are they so much cuter than their elders...but they are less likely to have gone through the transformative process of cleaning out their deceased parents' stuff. Once you go through that, you can never look at *your* stuff in the same way. You start to look at your stuff a little postmortemistically. If you've lived more than two decades as an adult consumer, you probably have quite the accumulation, even if you're not a hoarder...I'm not saying I never buy stuff, because I absolutely do. Maybe I'm less naive about the joys of accumulation.

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.

Make art and live simply.

Minimalism is saying all by saying nothing.

Minimalism can help you find contentment and satisfaction and finally put meaning into your life. Just removing unnecessary things that do not bring any value to you will essentially open the door to a brand new perspective on living.

Minimalism is about creating space to live simply and meaningfully; it’s about living intentionally.

Minimalism means not trying to improve perfection.

My creative muse is wabi-sabi, a practice where inessentials are trimmed away or eliminated. The intersection where wabi (minimal) and sabi (functional) meet is the platform for my creativity: space and quiet solitude, simplicity.

Not every possession is belonging.

Nothing humbles a rich man better than not being wanted by a woman whose man is poor.

Often more connections can mean greater distance.

Often removing is improving.

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!

Own less stuff. Enjoy more freedom. It really is that simple.

One can with but moderate possessions do what one ought.

Perhaps, it is not necessary to have so many things. Perhaps, it is not necessary to do so many things. Do we really need it all? Or are we drowning ourselves in things and busyness?

Per quanti oggetti possediate, la loro quantità è pur sempre limitata. Se riuscite a scoprire quali oggetti vi danno gioia e a decidere dove riporli, il riordino finirà, prima o poi. Più andate avanti, più vi avvicinate all'obiettivo di avere una casa piena di felicità.

Pretty much all wealthy people who were willing to lose and have lost their health while chasing wealth are now willing to lose their wealth while chasing health.

Productivity is directly proportional to your ability to eliminate unnecessarily.

Quick reminder for Amazon Prime Day: If you didn’t need to buy it at full price, you don’t need to buy it on sale.

Owning less is better than organizing more.

Reduction is the least observed of the three R’s of environmentalism (‘reduce, reuse, recycle’) but it’s probably the most important. Reuse and recycling are sensible measures in an over-productive society, but why not neutralise the problem of overproduction at the source? Instead of choosing to act efficiently at the end of a product’s life cycle by reusing or recycling it, we should stop said product from being made in the first place by eliminating consumer demand for it. If the rainforests must be burned and the oceans poisoned to cater for the essentials of human life, then so be it and we’ll call it an inevitable pity; but for that to happen in the name of games consoles, cell phones and chocolate fountains is a wanton and avoidable shame.

Reduce what you have. Decrease what you want.

Say NO to all meaningless activities, so do not need a calendar to remember when is the next really fulfilling event in your life.

Simplicity is all but nothing that's there.

Secondo dei dati statistici, trascorriamo in media trenta minuti al giorno a cercare le cose, e chi è particolarmente disordinato dedica alla ricerca degli oggetti smarriti addirittura due ore al giorno. Se una persona lavora venti giorni al mese, significa che spreca fino a quaranta ore al mese a cercare cose che non sono al loro posto. Se riuscite a risolvere questo problema in sole sei ore, il ritorno dell’investimento di tempo sarà enorme e immediato. Con una scrivania ordinata che vi dà gioia, la vostra efficienza al lavoro è destinata a crescere.

She remembered who she was and the game changed.

Simplicity isn't about being a cold, hard minimalist. A different way of looking at simplicity is to take note of the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi. It is difficult to translate it directly into a Western sensibility but it is a way of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature.

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

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

Some things are made way more appealing than they are by our lack of them.

Some things are good for our image but bad for our pockets.

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.

Sometimes, minimizing possessions means a dream must die. But this is not always a bad thing. Sometimes, it takes giving up the person we wanted to be in order to fully appreciate the person we can actually become.