This page lists my all-time favorite simple living quotes to inspire a simple life.
You can find links to more intentional living quotes at the bottom of this page.
When you’re ready to dive deeper, here’s my recommended reading on simple living and simplicity:
35+ Simple Living Quotes to Live a Simple Life Today
“You only lose what you cling to.” — Siddhārtha Gautama
“Live simply so that others may simply live.” — Mahatma Gandhi
“One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity … It is merely simplicity; the ability to express the utmost with the minimum.” — Bruce Lee
“I think luxury is a matter not of all the things you have, but of all the things you can afford to do without.” — Pico Iyer
“Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.” — Einstein
“The five ascending levels of intellect: Smart, Intelligent, Brilliant, Genius, Simple.” — Einstein
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” — Da Vinci
“The highest level of mastery is simplicity. Most information is irrelevant and most effort is wasted, but only the expert knows what to ignore.” — James Clear
“Simplicity is an advanced course.” — Sri Chinmoy
“Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.” — Agile Manifesto Principles
“I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day … So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.” — Henry David Thoreau
“Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” — Henry David Thoreau
“I think about life as having three things at least that I think are really important. One of them is increasing simplicity. Just sheer simplicity. Two is time in flow state. The third is time with people I love.” — Jim Collins
“The more you have, the more you are occupied, the less you give. But the less you have the more free you are.” — Mother Teresa
“A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.” — Annie Dillard
“The more you know, the less you need.” — Yvon Chouinard
“The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life. It’s so easy to make it complex.” — Yvon Chouinard
“Everything is simpler than we can imagine, at the same time more complex and intertwined than can be comprehended.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“To live voluntarily, is to live conscientiously and deliberately, and to live more simply is to unencumber oneself in all aspects of life in order to ‘(meet) life face to face.’ In short, voluntary simplicity is ‘outwardly more simple and inwardly more rich.'” — Duane Elgin
“In the 1980s, simplicity was seen primarily as ‘downshifting,’ or pulling back from the rat race of consumer society. Several decades later, there is a growing recognition of simplicity as ‘upshifting’ — or moving beyond the rat race to the human race.” — Duane Elgin
“Humanity can still prosper for 150,000 years … but this depends on choosing a voluntary simplicity … growing qualitatively, not quantitatively.” — Matthieu Ricard
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” — Hans Hoffman
“Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.” — Edwin Way Teale
“Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.” — Thomas Mann
“Life is simple. It’s what we believe about life that complicates it.” — Byron Katie
“This is the core of voluntary simplicity. We are trying to find a way to live that helps us become fully alive. We are trying to discover and remove the things that are deadening, that cause us to escape … all the things that numb us and put us to sleep.” — Cecile Andrews
“In actual life, it requires the greatest art to be simple.” — Carl Jung
“Take a simple idea and take it seriously.” — Charlie Munger
“A quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest.” — Einstein
“Meditation could be said to be the Art of Simplicity: simply sitting, simply breathing and simply being.” — Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” — Charles Mingus
“Simplicity is the master key to financial success. When there are multiple solutions to a problem, choose the simplest one.” — John Bogle
“I’d always believed that a life of quality, enjoyment, and wisdom were my human birthright … I never suspected that I would have to learn how to live … ways of seeing the world I had to master before I could awaken to a simple, happy, uncomplicated life.” — Dan Millman
“The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.” — Paulo Coelho
“In order to seek one’s own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life.” — Plato
“Appoint certain days on which to give up everything and make yourself at home with next to nothing. Start cultivating a relationship with poverty. For no one is worthy of god unless he has paid no heed to riches. I am not, mind you, against your possessing them, but I want to ensure that you possess them without tremors; and this you will only achieve in one way, by convincing yourself that you can live a happy life even without them, and by always regarding them as being on the point of vanishing.” — Seneca
“To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter… to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring — these are some of the rewards of the simple life.” — John Burroughs
“It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town… he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety.” — Henry David Thoreau
“The greatest challenge in life is to be our own person and accept that being different is a blessing and not a curse. A person who knows who they are lives a simple life by eliminating from their orbit anything that does not align with his or her overriding purpose and values. A person must be selective with their time and energy because both elements of life are limited.” — Kilroy J. Oldster
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