The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (Magic Cleaning #1)

by Marie Kondō

Effective tidying involves only two essential actions: discarding and deciding where to store things. Of the two, discarding must come first.

we should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of.

To truly cherish the things that are important to you, you must first discard those that have outlived their purpose.

It is not our memories but the person we have become because of those past experiences that we should treasure. This is the lesson these keepsakes teach us when we sort them. The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.

Clutter has only two possible causes: too much effort is required to put things away or it is unclear where things belong.