I like being at home with my music and my books. I’ve done all the partying, I’ve done enough partying for four or five people as a young fella. But now I like the quiet life.
I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
Mistake not. Those pleasures are not pleasures that trouble the quiet and tranquillity of thy life.
If you give up your quiet life, the bow of Cupid will lose its power.
I expect to retire to a fine-grained heaven where the temperatures are always consistent, where the images slide before one's eyes in a continual cascade of form and meaning.
I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
The brash unbridled tongue, the lawless folly of fools, will end in pain. But the life of wise content is blest with quietness, escapes the storm and keeps its house secure.
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd, I stand and look at them long and long.
Ask the world to reveal its quietude- not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.
One may live tranquilly in a dungeon; but does life consist in living quietly?
Keep clear of courts: a homely life transcends The vaunted bliss of monarchs and their friends.
Serene will be our days, and bright and happy will our nature be, when love is an unerring light, and joy its own security.
The best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.
