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"For myself I can say that, having had every good thing that money can buy, an experience like another, I could part without a pang with every possession I have. We live in uncertain times and our all may yet be taken from us. With enough plain food to satisfy my small appetite, a room to myself, books from a public library, pens and paper, I should regret nothing."
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Exlpore more Minimalism quotes
"I've always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you."
"I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run."
"There's been a lot written on the topic of minimalism. But I still believe in it."
"Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being."
"Progress is discovering what you can do without."
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
"It was amazing how many books one could fit into a room, assuming one didn't want to move around very much."
"Diogenes carried a bowl with him for years, but one day saw a man drinking from his cupped palm and declared, 'I have been a fool, burdened all these years by the weight of a bowl when a perfectly good vessel lay at the end of my wrist."
Explore more quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
"I do not attachany exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life isthere to be lived rather than to be written about. My aimis to search out the manifold experience that it offers,wringing from each moment what of emotion it presents.I look upon my writing as a graceful accomplishmentwhich does not absorb but rather adds pleasure toexistence. And as for posterity-damn posterity."
"It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the sense; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it."
"I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do."
"A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute."
"Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour."
"What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?"
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