Voluntary Simplicity Quotes

#1. Voluntary simplicity means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

#2. Voluntary simplicity has more to do with the state of mind than a person's physical surroundings and possessions.

Duane Elgin

#3. It seems to me that inner growth is the whole moving force behind voluntary simplicity.

Duane Elgin

#4. To me, voluntary simplicity means integration and awareness in my life.

Duane Elgin

#5. As my spiritual growth expanded and developed, voluntary simplicity was a natural outgrowth. I came to realize the cost of material accumulation was too high and offered fewer and fewer real rewards, psychological and spiritual.

Duane Elgin

#6. The essence of voluntary simplicity is living in a way what is outwardly simple and inwardly rich.

Duane Elgin

#7. The intention of this way of life [voluntary simplicity] is not to dogmatically live with less. It's a more demanding intention of living with balance. This is a middle way that moves between the extremes of poverty and indulgence.

Duane Elgin

#8. Five Life Standards of Voluntary Simplicity
Do Justice
Learn from the World Community
Nurture People
Cherish the Natural Order
Non-Conform Freely.

Doris Janzen Longacre

#9. As a boy, I used to look at reproductions of Rembrandt's portraits ... the people in his paintings were so real I felt I knew them ... It is his empathy for the sitter, combined with his enjoyment and dexerity in handling paint that captured my imagination then, and is what I am striving for still.

David Cobley

#10. It is nearly always the most improbable things that really come to pass.

E.T.A. Hoffmann

#11. There's those who talk about it. And there's those who BE about it!

John Cena

#12. The relationship between ethics and thrift can be summed up in one sentence. It is wrong to save money at the expense of others. Period.

Amy Dacyczyn

#13. When I was about six or seven, I did this character reenactment performance where I read a monologue from 'Peter Pan.' I got into a complete Peter Pan outfit and did a little paragraph from the script - and I ended up winning an award for it.

Levi Miller

#14. Tightwaddery without creativity is deprivation. When there is a lack of resourcefulness, inventiveness, and innovation, thrift means doing without. When creativity combines with thrift you may be doing it without money, but you are not doing without.

Amy Dacyczyn

#15. In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.

Alan Watts

#16. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

Henry David Thoreau

#17. Here the sky is wrapped in silk. The breathings of so many men and animals, and the smoke of your coal, and the fog, oh, it is too much. The Paris sky is perfect. A man must see clearly, to see something new.

John Pipkin