44 Minimalism Quotes

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.

Often when looking at a mass of things for sale, he would say to himself, 'How many things I have no need of!'

To need nothing is divine, and the less a man needs the nearer does he approach to divinity.

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

The loss of wealth is loss of dirt, As sages in all times assert; The happy man's without a shirt.

I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas. I just think about it.

I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.

Some people collect paperweights, or pre-Columbian figures, or old masters, or young mistresses, or tombstone rubbings, or five-minute recipes, or any of a thousand other things including bruises, most of them satisfying, depending on the genes and the bank account and where the heart lies. My own collection is sunrises; and I find that they have their advantages. Sunrises are usually handsome, they can't possibly be dusted, and they take only a little room, so long as it has a window to see them from. Moreover, I can't give way to the urge to show off my collection to my friends. I can only talk about it, and they needn't listen.

I hold that to need nothing is divine, and the less a man needs the nearer he does approach divinity.

With his dark, sensitive looks, his face in repose evoking years of quiet contemplation, he resembled a mixture of Buddhist monk and fashion model. He offered the ideal face and acting style for motion pictures, proving less is more. He would become a master of knowing when to do nothing at all.

To you, all you have seems small: to me, all I have seems great. Your desire is insatiable, mine is satisfied. See children thrusting their hands into a narrow-necked jar, and striving to pull out the nuts and figs it contains: if they fill the hand, they cannot pull it out again, and then they fall to tears.-'Let go a few of them, and then you can draw out the rest!'-You, too, let your desire go! covet not many things, and you will obtain (95)

Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them.

Pauper enim non est, cui rerum suppetit usus. si ventri bene, si lateri est pedibusque tuis, nil divitiae poterunt regales addere maius.

Every possession is just another stick to beat yourself with.

Six feet of land was all that he needed.

Quod siquis vera vitam ratione gubernet, divitiae grandes homini sunt vivere parvo aequo animo; neque enim est umquam penuria parvi.

One should eat to keep the body going.

I only know one prayer - 'Give me the truth, Give me that colored whiteness, ancient youth, Complex and simple, seen in joy and ruth. Let me not by vain wishes bar my claim, Nor soothe my hunger by an empty name, Nor crucify the Son of man by hasty blame. But in the earth and fire, water and air, Live earnestly by turns without despair, Nor seek a home till home be every where!'

(In his usual dry, monotone voice) 'Thanks.'

One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough.

We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.

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.

Je weniger einer, in Folge objektiver oder subjektiver Bedingungen, notig hat, mit den Menschen in Beruhrung zu kommen, desto besser ist er daran.

To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power.

You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake; you must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand heap.

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

He chose to be rich by making his wants few, and supplying them himself. In his travels, he used the railroad only to get over so much country as was unimportant to the present purpose, walking hundreds of miles, avoiding taverns, buying a lodging in farmers' and fishermen's houses, as cheaper, and more agreeable to him, and because there he could better find the men and the information he wanted. There was somewhat military in his nature not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise.

In art economy is always beauty.

Whatever you can lose, you should reckon of no account.

Time is never a problem on the God level. Or space. Whatever needed to deceive you was provided. But no more than that. That is the conservative principle in art at the God level. While I can't do it, not being at that level, I have seen a lot of it done. A skillful Artist in shapes and appearances does no more than necessary to create His effect.

Diejenige Regierung ist die beste, die sich uberflussing macht.

Ikenobo Sen'o, a master of flower arranging, once said (the remark is to be found in his Sayings): 'With a spray of flowers, a bit of water, one evokes the vastness of rivers and mountains.' The Japanese garden too, of course symbolizes the vastness of nature. The Western garden tends to be symmetrical, the Japanese garden asymmetrical, and this is because the asymmetrical has the greater power to symbolize multiplicity and vastness. The asymmetry, of course, rests upon a balance imposed by delicate sensibilities. Nothing is more complicated, varied, attentive to detail, than the Japanese art of landscape gardening. Thus there is the form called the dry landscape, composed entirely of rocks, in which the arrangement of stones gives expression to mountains and rivers that are not present, and even suggests the waves of the great ocean breaking in upon cliffs.

The single flower contains more brightness than a hundred flowers. The great sixteenth-century master of the tea ceremony and flower arranging, Rikyu, taught that it was wrong to use fully opened flowers. Even in the tea ceremony today the general practice is to have in the alcove of the tea room but a single flower, and that a flower in bud. In winter a special flower of winter, let us say a camellia, bearing some such name as White Jewel or Wabisuke, which might be translated literally as 'Helpmate in Solitude', is chosen, a camellia remarkable among camellias for its whiteness and the smallness of its blossoms; and but a single bud is set out in the alcove. White is the cleanest of colors, it contains in itself all the other colors. And there must always be dew on the bud. The bud is moistened with a few drops of water.

Simplify, simplify.

Less is more.