Browsing Topic Best Minimalism Quotes

The more you learn to live without, the more you’ll have to live with.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

Contentment comes not so much from great wealth as from few wants.

Minimalism is not defined by what is not there but by the rightness of what is and the richness with which this is experienced.

We go on multiplying our conveniences only to multiply our cares. We increase our possessions only to the enlargement of our anxieties.

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.

Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity. From discord find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

Also minimalism is a term that all of us who share so little in common and who are lumped together as minimalists are not terribly happy with.

You say, ‘If I had a little more, I should be very satisfied.’ You make a mistake. If you are not content with what you have, you would not be satisfied if it were doubled.

The rules that I adhere to are the rules of minimalism. And those rules kind of force writing to be more filmic… to have the immediacy and accessibility of film so that the reader really has to fill in a lot of the details.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

Minimalism is not a style, it is an attitude, a way of being. It’s a fundamental reaction against noise, visual noise, disorder, vulgarity. Minimalism is the pursuit of the essence of things, not the appearance.

If one’s life is simple, contentment has to come.

Fashion is meant to be wild and expressive. I love colour but I also love basics – grungy minimalism mixed with this kind of broken-down cheerleader, is my thing.

Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don’t any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.

If one’s life is simple, contentment has to come. Simplicity is extremely important for happiness. Having few desires, feeling satisfied with what you have, is very vital: satisfaction with just enough food, clothing, and shelter to protect yourself from the elements.

I was lucky to be born during the time of minimalism. I think I can be colder because of this. In form I speak with minimalism but my feeling is sentimental – I am a sentimental minimalist.

Minimalism is the pursuit of the essence of things, not the appearance.

The intention of this way of life [voluntary simplicity] is not to dogmatically live with less. It’s a more demanding intention of living with balance. This is a middle way that moves between the extremes of poverty and indulgence.

The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.

Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form. This art of the nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass.

My thoughts are messy, my emotions are messy, my body goes in and out at will. The raised white scars on my arms and legs are the only aspect of my being that comes close to minimalism. They came from chaos, but it is hard to carve frustration and unease into the flesh. Only straight lines.

Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.

Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.

The trouble with simple living is that, though it can be joyful, rich, and creative, it isn’t simple.

I have much to learn from my daughter Sofia. Her minimalism exposes my limitations: I’m too instinctive and operatic, I put too much heart into my work, I get lost sometimes in bizarre things – it’s my Italian heritage.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

Minimalism now is a reaction to what came before. It’s absolutely of its time. Music moved into the set theory thing, and moved out of it.

One can furnish a room very luxuriously by taking out furniture rather than putting it in.

Eyes blinded by the fog of things cannot see truth. Ears deafened by the din of things cannot hear truth. Brains bewildered by the whirl of things cannot think truth. Hearts deadened by the weight of things cannot feel truth. Throats choked by the dust of things cannot speak truth.

What does it mean when you hook up your work to that of a late modernist giant working in a reductive vein – Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, or Donald Judd, for example – like a caboose? I am not talking about engaging directly with another artist’s work or ideas, but of perpetuating a look or, in the case of Wade Guyton, the various monochromatic, striped and geometric surfaces we associate with Minimalism.