Fumio Sasaki Quotes

I want to create my own living space and grow my own food instead of paying someone to supply those for me.

Traditional paintings have few figures in them and value negative space. Japanese calligraphy and brush paintings are in black and white. Haiku is the shortest poem form in the world. These are a few examples of a minimalistic aesthetic in Japanese art and culture.

There’s happiness in having less.

Whether we live alone or with other people, few acknowledge the presence of another roommate. This roommate is named ‘Things’ and the space that ‘Things’ occupies is typically a lot larger than the space people have for themselves.

If you ask me what minimalism is really about, I would say that it’s the altering of values – enter the small doors of minimalism and come out on the other side with big ideas.

There are more things to gain from eliminating excess than you might imagine: time, space, freedom, and energy, for example.

I actually think that the more something is important to you, the more it’s OK to actually let it go.

It’s not as though you feel satisfied after collecting a certain amount of stuff. Instead, you keep thinking about what you’re missing.

Spending less time on cleaning or shopping means I have more time to spend with friends, go out, or travel on my days off.

In my community of minimalists, there are really wealthy people who work at stock brokerage firms, there are people who are unemployed, but it doesn’t seem to matter. We’re all really good friends, and we get along really well. It’s a very varied and diverse community.

You can’t help but fixate on something that you’re about to throw away because it’s right in front of you.

Living with only the bare essentials has not only provided superficial benefits such as the pleasure of a tidy room or the simple ease of cleaning, it has also led to a more fundamental shift. It’s given me a chance to think about what it really means to be happy.

Holding on to things from the past is the same as clinging to an image of yourself in the past. If you’re the least bit interested in changing anything about yourself, I suggest you be brave and start letting things go.

We think that the more we have, the happier we will be. We never know what tomorrow might bring, so we collect and save as much as we can. This means we need a lot of money, so we gradually start judging people by how much money they have.

To me, DIY means minimizing dependency on what others make for me.

The important thing is not the measurement of how many or few things you have, but your own state of mind and how you feel about the things you have and don’t have.

I wasn’t always a minimalist. I used to buy a lot of things, believing that all those possessions would increase my self-worth and lead to a happier life. I loved collecting a lot of useless stuff, and I couldn’t throw anything away.

Unhappiness isn’t just the result of genetics or past trauma or career trouble. I think that some of our unhappiness is simply due to the burden of all our things.

I enjoy challenging myself to try new things, going outdoors, scuba diving, running a marathon. Anything that I have never done before, I enjoy trying it out.