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 trouble with simple living is that, though it can be joyful, rich, and creative, it isn’t simple. – Doris Janzen Longacre

Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves. – Edwin Way Teale

To those who complain of the complexity of modern life, he [Henry David Thoreau] might reply, “If you want inner peace find it in solitude, not speed, and if you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go.” – Stewart Udall, The Quiet Crisis, 1963