Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.
If this were all to go away tomorrow, all the big success, I would still be very happy going from bar to bar playing music for people.
He was a man who understood the virtue of small things.
I learned to hear silence. That's the kind of life I lived: simple. I learned to see things in people around me, in my mom, dad, brothers and sisters.
Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking, brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness.
Enough is abundance to the wise.
Burn to be great, Pay not thy praise to lofty things alone. The plains are everlasting as the hills, The bard cannot have two pursuits; aught else Comes on the mind with the like shock as though Two worlds had gone to war, and met in air.
"... he had understood, better than anyone ... the beauty that grew out of the simple knowledge that everything, no matter how small or large it might be, was a perfect example of what it was."
True perfection in all things is no longer known or prized - you must write music that is either so simple a coachman could sing it, or so unintelligble that audiences like it simply because no sane person could understand it.
This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.
Great is he who enjoys his earthenware as if it were plate, and not less great is the man to whom all his plate is no more that earthenware.
I think I like 'em better like that...divinely dull...just the quiet bearers of their own beauty, like the priestesses in a Panathenaic procession.
The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one.
After the doctor's departure Koznyshev felt inclined to go to the river with his fishing rod. He was fond of angling, and seemed proud of being able to like such a stupid occupation.
The older I get, the more I dance like my dad, and I'm finding that suddenly cardigans are becoming more attractive to me.
I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage, with my books, my family, and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post which any human power can give.
Do not be troubled because you have not great virtues. God made a million spears of grass where He made one tree. The earth is fringed and carpeted, not with forests, but with grasses. Only have enough of little virtues and common fidelities, and you need not mourn because you are neither a hero or a saint.
I was a very happy kid. I didn't get new bikes very often. We ate a lot of chicken legs for dinner. But I never felt in want of anything. I wasn't cognizant until much later of the discrepancy between what we had and what other people had.
This is a common experience in my traveling. I plod along, thinking what a miserable world this is and what miserable fellows we that inhabit it, wondering what it is tempts men to live in it; but anon I leave the towns behind and am lost in some boundless heath, and life becomes gradually more tolerable, if not even glorious.
Even rain and wind and stormy clouds bring joy, just as knowing animals and flowers and where they live.
To set but a low value upon toast is to expose one's deficiencies in right appreciation.
He who accepts his poverty unhurt I'd say is rich although he lacked a shirt. But truly poor are they who whine and fret and covet what they cannot hope to get.
To grow up under really simple circumstances, and to understand that certain things were ornamental... that made an impression on me as a child and is something I use.
I love to be alone with life. I love to study simple things: the light as it filters in a window; the music of a room full of people chatting; a horizon.
I would say that my idea of style and my taste are the same as when I began: They express my deep appreciation of all that is simple and linear... I always want to keep up with the times but without altering the essential characteristics of my philosophy.
