Simple living quotes
Old, quiet words about living simply, one at a time. Each one is checked against the book or poem it came from.
I love a broad margin to my life.
Often shared as: “”
Where these quotes come from
Every quote here was checked word for word against the original book, essay or poem, and all of them are old enough to be in the public domain in the US, the UK and the EU. Many simple living quotes shared online are misquoted or credited to the wrong person. Where a line is usually shared in a different form, you’ll see a small note with the version you may have seen.
Sharing a quote
Copy the words, or save the quote as a square image to keep on your phone or share. Please keep the author’s name with the words.
A little about the writers
Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden after two years in a small cabin by Walden Pond, in Massachusetts. Kakuzō Okakura wrote The Book of Tea in English in 1906 to explain the Japanese tea ceremony to Western readers. W. H. Davies spent years tramping through Britain and America before he wrote “Leisure.”
All 32 simple living quotes
“Our life is frittered away by detail. … Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” (1854) “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” (1854) “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” (1854) “Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” (1854) “I love a broad margin to my life.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Sounds” (1854) “Leave this military hurry and adopt the pace of Nature. Her secret is patience.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lectures and Biographical Sketches, “Education” (1883) Often shared as: “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”
“In the woods, we return to reason and faith.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, chapter I (1836) “Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.”
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, “Song of the Open Road” (1856) Often shared as: “Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.”
“I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.”
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself” (1855) “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains.”
Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (1882) “Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.”
William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, “The Tables Turned” (1798) “While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.”
William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798) “The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers”
William Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes, “The world is too much with us” (1807) “The poetry of earth is never dead”
John Keats, Poems, “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” (1817) “What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.”
W. H. Davies, Songs of Joy and Others, “Leisure” (1911) “There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque, “An Apology for Idlers” (1881) “Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque, “An Apology for Idlers” (1881) “The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses, “Happy Thought” (1885) “Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you …”
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (1889) “In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks.”
John Muir, Steep Trails, “Mormon Lilies” (1918) “I go to Nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more.”
John Burroughs, Time and Change, “The Gospel of Nature” (1912) Often shared as: “I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.”
“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the blue sky, is by no means waste of time.”
John Lubbock, The Use of Life (1894) Often shared as: “Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”
“To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.”
George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Art (1905) Often shared as: “To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.”
“Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.”
Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Modes and Morals, “Caviare on Principle” (1920) “Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.”
Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea, “The Cup of Humanity” (1906) “Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea.”
Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea, “The Cup of Humanity” (1906) “Study to be quiet.”
Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (1653) Walton’s closing words, quoting 1 Thessalonians 4:11.
“Nowhere can a man find any retreat more quiet and more full of leisure than in his own soul.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV.3 (Foulis translation of 1742, revised by G. W. Chrystal, 1902) “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, §139 (translated by W. F. Trotter, 1904) “Rest belongs to the work as the eyelids to the eyes.”
Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds, no. 24 (1916) “Let my doing nothing when I have nothing to do become untroubled in its depth of peace like the evening in the seashore when the water is silent.”
Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds, no. 208 (1916) “There are tracts in my life that are bare and silent. They are the open spaces where my busy days had their light and air.”
Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds, no. 324 (1916)