The Quest of the Simple Life Quotes

“It would seem that the anxieties of getting money only beget the more torturing anxiety of how to keep it.”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“Solitude, which is one of the most agreeable sensations of the natural man, is one of the most painful and alarming sensations of the civilised man.”
― William J. Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“The thing that is least perceived about wealth is that all pleasure in money ends at the point where economy becomes unnecessary. The man who can buy anything he covets, without any consultation with his banker, values nothing that he buys.”
― William J. Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“My experiment I regard as successful, but there are two features in it which diminish its general application. One is that I took with me into my solitude certain tastes and aptitudes, which I may claim without the least egoism to be not altogether common. I had an intense love of Nature, a delight in physical exertion, and a vital interest in literature. I was thus provided with resources in myself. It would be the height of folly for a person wholly destitute of these aptitudes to venture upon such a life as mine. He would find the country unutterably wearisome, its pursuits a detestable form of drudgery, and the unoccupied hours of his life tedious beyond expression.”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life: W. J. Dawson's Search for Simplicity (Best Motivational Books for Personal Development

“After four years' experiment in Quest of the Simple Life I am in a position to state certain conclusions, which are sufficiently authoritative with me to suggest that they may have some weight with my readers. These conclusions I will briefly recapitulate. The chief discovery which I have made is that man may lead a perfectly honourable, sufficing, and even joyous existence upon a very small income. Money plays a part in human existence much less important than we suppose. The best boon that money can bestow upon us is independence. How much money do we need to secure independence? That must depend on the nature of our wants.”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life: W. J. Dawson's Search for Simplicity (Best Motivational Books for Personal Development

“I suspect there is a great deal of cant to be cleared out of the mind before we can become equitable judges of what doing good really means. I define doing good as the fulfilment of our best instincts and faculties for the best use of mankind; but I do not expect that the Good Earnest People will accept this definition. They would find it much too catholic, simply because they have learned to attach a specialised meaning to the phrase ‘doing good,’ which limits it to some form of active philanthropy. If they would but allow a wider vision of life to pass before the eye, they would see that there are many ways of doing good besides those which satisfy their own ideals. It is a singular thing that men find it very difficult to live lives of charity without cherishing uncharitable tempers towards those who do not live precisely as they themselves do. For instance, the busy philanthropist, nobly eager to bring a little happiness into the grey lives of the disinherited, often has the poorest opinion of artists and novelists, who appear to him to live useless lives. But when Turner paints a picture like the Fighting Temeraire Towed to Her Last Berth, which is destined to stir generous thoughts in multitudes of hearts long after his death: or when Scott writes novels which have increased the sum of human happiness for a century, is not each doing good of the rarest, highest, and most enduring kind? The fulfilment of one's best instincts and faculties, for the best use of mankind, is not only the completest, but also the only available form of philanthropy. Since Nature has chosen to endow us with diverse faculties, our service of mankind must be diverse too. In a word, doing good is a much larger business than the ordinary philanthropist imagines; it has many branches and a thousand forms; and they are not always doing the most who seem the busiest, nor do those accomplish most in the alleviation of human misery whose contact with it is the closest.”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life: W. J. Dawson's Search for Simplicity (Best Motivational Books for Personal Development

“Thoreau's defence when he was accused of not doing good was that it did not agree with his constitution; and although the defence sounds like a piece of amusing cynicism, it was in reality a plea entirely just. The common fault of the Good Earnest People, as of most people, is that they can only conceive of doing good after a pattern which is congenial to themselves. But their mode of doing good, while it suits themselves admirably, may not suit every constitution, and people of a quite different mental constitution may be quite as good as themselves, although it is after a very different pattern. Thoreau did a vast amount of good by showing men, in his own example, that the simplest kind of life was compatible with the highest intellectual aims; would he, in the long-run, have served the world half as well had he forced himself to live amid the squalor of a New York slum?”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life: W. J. Dawson's Search for Simplicity (Best Motivational Books for Personal Development

“In the life of the merest insect are toils as great, and vicissitudes as tragic, as in the most heroic human life, and to see so much is to attach a new dignity to all kinds of life. The bird building its nest is doing precisely the same thing as the man who builds his house, and with an equal skill of architecture. The flower, fighting for its life, is engaged in the same struggle as man, for whom every breath and pulse-beat is a victory over forces that threaten his destruction. The world is full of identities, each unmoved by the tremendous scale of its environment. Hence a new kind of neighbourship is possible, wider and more catholic than the neighbourship between man and man. Kinship, not in kindred, but in universal life, becomes possible. There is no sense of loneliness in a country life after that discovery is made.”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life: W. J. Dawson's Search for Simplicity (Best Motivational Books for Personal Development

“A certain faculty for arithmetic represents a man who has many higher faculties; and thus the man is forced to live by one capacity which is perhaps his least worthy and significant. This is not the case in what we call the liberal professions and the arts. The architect, the barrister, the humblest journalist needs his whole mind for his task, and hence his work is a delight. The artist, if he be a true artist, does the one thing that he was born to do, and so ‘the hours pass away untold, without chagrin, and without weariness,’ nor would he wish them to pass otherwise.”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life: W. J. Dawson's Search for Simplicity (Best Motivational Books for Personal Development

“They see nothing deplorable in a lot to which they have become accustomed;”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“There is an even worse result. Earth-hunger has been displaced by Money-hunger.”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“my first business as a rational creature was not to get a living but to live; and that I was a fool to sacrifice the power of living in securing the means of life.”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“To the rural mind the metropolis appears an entity; in reality it is an empire. A journey from the extreme north to the extreme south, from Muswell Hill to Dulwich, is less easily accomplished, and often less speedily, than a journey from London to Birmingham.”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“No writer, whose work is familiar to me, has ever yet described with unsparing fidelity the kind of misery which lies in having to do precisely the same things at the same hour, through long and consecutive periods of time. The hours then become a dead weight which oppresses the spirit to the point of torture.”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“saw that it was the artificial needs of life that made me a slave; the real needs of life were few. A cottage and a hundred pounds a year in a village meant happiness and independence; but dared I sacrifice twice or thrice the income to secure it? The debate went on for years, and it was ended only when I applied to it one fixed and reasoned principle. That principle was that my first business as a rational creature was not to get a living but to live; and that I was”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“It is of a piece with the theory of 'doing good'; for all men are bigots when they attempt to measure the universal life of men by their own little egoistic standards.”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“the man who passes from a distinguished University career to a distinguished public life may do more for the poor by his pen, by his power of awakening sympathy, by the opportunity that may be his to obtain the reversal of unjust laws or the establishment of good laws, than he ever could have done by living in a slum as the friend and helper of a small group of needy men and women. Decisive victories are won more often by lateral movements than by frontal attacks. The wave of force which travels on a circle may arrive with more thrilling impact on a point of contact than that which travels on a horizontal line. Society is best served after all by the fullest development of our best faculties; and whether we check this development from pious or selfish motives, the result is still the same; we have robbed society of its profit by us, which is the worst kind of evil which we can inflict on the community.”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“New worlds need a Columbus, and the social Columbus is always a man with sufficient daring to stand by original convictions. Therefore I say that human progress is only made possible by not taking the world as we find it; and that he is the best friend of collective progress who is the most obedient not to collective convention, but to individual insight.”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“Satisfaction is the death of progress, and I knew well that if I once acquiesced entirely in the conditions of my life, my fate was sealed.”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“He gets a living, and perhaps in time an ample living; but does he live?”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“The question that soon comes to obtrude itself upon the mind of a thoughtful man in a great city, is this old persistent question of whether his method of life is such as to answer to the ideal of fulfilling his best self? It seemed to me that the inhabitants of cities were too busy getting a living to have time to live.”
― William James Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“the give-and-take of happily contending minds—all, indeed, that makes true conversation—is a science”
― William J. Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“Blessed is he who has variety in his life: thrice blessed is he who has both freedom and variety:”
― William J. Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“the growth of cities is a sequence, alike ineluctable and pitiless, of the modern struggle for existence.”
― William J. Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

“  Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons;   It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth.”
― William J. Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life