Quotes about Simplicity

Many people find the universe confusing - it's not.

The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly.

Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment instead. It is such a willingness to live with bewilderment that characterizes the true wise man.

St. Bonaventure (1221—1274) taught that to work up to loving God, start by loving the very humblest and simplest things, and then move up from there.

We have become human doings more than human beings, and the verb "rest," as Jesus uses it, is largely foreign to us.

Once we begin to learn the contemplative mind, we realize it is almost the natural way of seeing—and we have unlearned it! It is quite natural, as we see in children before the age of six or seven when they start judging and analyzing and distinguishing things one from another.

We have moved to a level where we have made happiness and contentment largely impossible. We have created a pseudo-happiness, largely based in having instead of being. We are so overstimulated that the ordinary no longer delights us. We cannot rest or abide in our naked being in God, as Jesus offers us.

Faith in any religion is always somehow saying that God is one and God is good, and if so, then all of reality must be that simple and beautiful too.

This new coherence, a unified field inclusive of the paradoxes, is precisely what gradually characterizes a second-half-of-life person. It feels like a return to simplicity after having learned from all the complexity. Finally, at last, one has lived long enough to see that "everything belongs,"4 even the sad, absurd, and futile parts.

How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?

We need to hold together all of the stages of life, and for some strange, wonderful reason, it all becomes quite "simple" as we approach our later years.

Words and complex rituals almost get in the way at this point. All you can really do is return such Presence with your own presence.