During the great storms of our lives we imitate those captains who jettison their weightiest cargo. – Honore de Balzac

If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. – Annie Dillard, “Seeing,” Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. – Hans Hofmann, Introduction to the Bootstrap, 1993