In all the best generations of Quakerism, the ideal aim and the controlling expectation of the wiser members have been to live the simple life. It is, of course, a vague and indefinable term. It is not a magic phrase by which one can ... suddenly leap from the extravagance of palatial living to the quiet Eden of a one-room cottage, with bark dishes and wooden spoons. The simple life does not begin outside, with the house or the spoons. It begins inside, with the quality of the soul. It is first and foremost the quality of sincerity, which is the opposite of duplicity or sham. Emerson's famous line, "Your life talks so loudly that I cannot hear the words you say, " makes the idea pretty clear. ... Unclouded honesty at the heart and centre of the man is the true basis of simplicity. ... But I pass from simplicity in the inner life and in worship to the "simple life" in its narrower sense. We come now to problems of business, of dress, of recreation, of entertainment, of culture, of luxury, in short to the world-old problem of how to live a Christian life, not in a cloister or an anchorite's cave, but in an eager, busy, complex world of more or less imperfect men and women. The saint of an earlier day tried to cut the knot by withdrawal. ... But ... he could not escape the self which he carried with him. All his problems came back in new fashion, and as far as he succeeded in cutting the bonds which bound him to his fellows he found himself shrinking and shriveling like a severed branch.

The endeavor to win goodness by withdrawal from society is as vain as the search for the lost fountain or the pursuit of an alchemy which will make gold out of lead. The only possible way to overcome the world is to carry the forces of the spiritual life into the veins of society until peace and love and righteousness prevail there. Rufus M. Jones The Faith and Practice of the Quakers