Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today; for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt.
I really like to live my life in a low-key fashion.
Early on, I played one or two disturbed people, and I guess I must have been good at it, because it stuck. But, you know, I'm a regular guy. I stay home a lot, I make an effort to keep a distance from the whole social thing, the openings, the parties. I try to live in a calm way.
I live a very quiet life, although I'm very urban and a diehard New Yorker.
Live your life without attracting attention.
Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray; Along the cool sequester'd vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
I learned snails don't have ears. They live in silence. They go slowly. Slowly, slowly in silence.
I'm not a guy who needs the spotlight. It's not something I have to have. I'm content to sit at home.
He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.
I want to stop. I want to stay on Fårö, and read the books I haven’t read, find out things I haven’t yet found out. I want to write things I haven’t written. To listen to music, and talk to my neighbors. To live together with my wife a very calm, very secure, very lazy existence, for the rest of my life.
I find beauty in a very independent state. It lives quietly. It's there to be discovered.
In Japan, I live in a little neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. I don't have a bicycle or a car or anything, so my only movement is within the boundaries of my feet. I feel there's a need for that kind of conscientious objection to the momentum of the world.
Give me, kind heaven, a private station, a mind serene for contemplation.
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
I lead an introverted and boring life here in California.
I don't know too many people because I stay at my house, I write songs, I go to the store.
I love a life whose plot is simple.
I envy that man who passes through life safely, to the world and fame unknown.
I seldom meet with characters so inoffensive as my hens and chickings, or minds so well improved as my garden.
Commenting on the politicians in the Madison administration:
Happy he whoe'er, content with the common lot, with safe breeze hugs the shore, and, fearing to trust his skiff to the wider sea, with unambitious oar keeps close to the land.
I want to resume the life of a shy person.
And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.
When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all.
How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!
Most men have no purpose but to exist, Abraham; to pass quietly through history as minor characters upon a stage they cannot even see