Charles Wagner · 1895
Quotes from The Simple Life
20 lines from the book, in the order they appear. Each one leads to its chapter.
Comfort, education, freedom, the whole fabric of civilization form the frame of the picture. But the frame does not make the picture, any more than the habit makes the monk or the uniform the soldier. The picture here is the human being, with what is most inward: conscience, character, and will. While we tended and embellished the frame, we forgot, neglected, and damaged the picture.
We come into the world with different gifts. One has received gold, another granite, a third marble, and most of us wood or clay. Our task is to shape these materials. Everyone knows that the most precious substance can be spoiled, but also that an immortal work can be made from material of no value.
True life consists in bringing higher goods - justice, love, truth, freedom, and moral strength - into our daily activity, whatever its place or outward form. Such a life is possible in the most varied social circumstances and with the most unequal natural gifts. It is not wealth or personal advantages, but the use we make of them, that gives life its value. Brilliance matters no more than length: quality is what counts.
The essential leads, the secondary obeys, and order is born of simplicity.
Since the sun still rises, since the earth flowers again, since the bird builds its nest, since the mother smiles at her child, let us have the courage to be human and entrust the rest to the One who has numbered the stars. As for me, I wish I could find burning words for anyone whose heart sinks in this disillusioned age: take courage, hope again; the person surest to err least is the one who dares to hope most. The most naive hope is closer to truth than the most reasoned despair.
Social relations rest on mutual trust, and that trust is nourished by each person's sincerity. As soon as sincerity diminishes, trust deteriorates, relationships suffer, and uncertainty arises.
A machine that spends all its steam whistling has none left to turn its wheels. Cultivate silence, then. Whatever you save in noise, you gain in strength.
Human ambition embraces vast undertakings in its dreams, but we are rarely given the chance to act on a grand scale; even then, swift and certain success always rests on patient preparation. Faithfulness in small things lies at the foundation of everything great that is accomplished. We forget this too often. Yet if there is a truth we need to know, it is this one, especially in difficult times and painful passages of life. In a shipwreck, people save themselves on a broken beam, an oar, a piece of plank. On life's turbulent waters, when everything seems to have broken into fragments, let us remember that a single one of those poor fragments may become our means of rescue. Discouragement begins with despising what remains.
To live in such a way that, amid life's work and troubles, we preserve the capacity to be happy and pass it on to others, as though by a wholesome contagion, is to practice solidarity in its noblest sense. To give a little pleasure, smooth worried brows, bring a little light to dark roads - what a truly divine service to poor humanity! Yet we can fulfill it only with great simplicity of heart.
When you see men or women devoted to demanding tasks or to the painful service of encountering human misery and tending wounds, remember that they are made as you are, that they have the same needs, and that there are hours when they require pleasure and forgetting. You will not draw them away from their calling by sometimes making them laugh, these people who see so many tears and troubles. On the contrary, you will restore strength for them to continue their labor better.
What a human being holds most precious has generally been received freely. Let us, in turn, know how to give it freely.
However formidable the din, however deafening the confusion of clashing showmen's voices, it reaches only so far, then subsides and dies away. The domain of silence is wider than the domain of noise. That is our consolation.
A small number of good people, often including country folk, women, people defeated by life, and parents as modest as they are revered, embody for us a beautiful and noble life. Their example inspires and sustains us. Their memory remains forever part of our inward world. In painful hours we see them, courageous and calm, and our burdens seem lighter. They stand close around us, an invisible and beloved company that keeps us from stumbling and losing our footing in the struggle. Every day they show us that humanity's treasure is the good the world does not know.
But not everyone has a tradition to preserve. All the more reason to redouble our efforts in building and nurturing family life. For this, we need neither a large household nor spacious rooms. To make a home, we need the spirit of home. Just as the smallest village can have its history and moral character, the smallest dwelling can have a soul.
Above all, we lack discernment when we take pride in our wealth or yield unconsciously to the seductions of luxury. To regard wealth as a personal quality is a childish confusion. We could hardly make a more naive mistake about the relative value of the wrapping and its contents.
It is a mistake to think that our advantages, whatever they may be, should serve our vanity. Each lays an obligation on its possessor, rather than offering a reason to boast. Material goods, power, knowledge, and qualities of heart and mind become sources of discord when they nourish pride. They remain beneficial only when they give their owners reasons for modesty. Let us be humble if we possess much, because it means we are in debt: everything a person has is owed to someone. Are we sure we can repay our debts?
The only distinction we need is the desire to become better. A person who strives to become better grows humbler, more approachable, even more familiar with those who owe them respect. But since they gain in esteem when known more closely, the hierarchy loses nothing. They harvest all the more respect for having sown less pride.
Truth will set us free: let us teach our children to be themselves, to sound their own note, without a crack or a mute. Let us make honesty a need for them; even in their gravest faults, provided they admit them, let us give them credit for having done wrong with their faces uncovered.
A child's sense of wonder is the first form of that sense of the infinite without which a human being is like a bird deprived of wings. Let us not wean childhood away from wonder, so that it may keep the power to rise above the earthbound and later appreciate those devout and moving symbols of vanished ages in which human truth found expressions our dry logic will never replace.
The spirit of simplicity is a great magician. It smooths roughness, builds bridges over fissures and chasms, and brings hands and hearts together. Its forms in the world are countless. Yet it never seems more admirable than when it breaks through the inevitable barriers of circumstances, interests, and prejudices, overcoming the worst obstacles and allowing people whom everything seems to divide to understand, esteem, and love one another. This is the true cement of society, and with this cement a people is built.
