Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! — Henry David Thoreau

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

Chapter 2, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" · spoken by Thoreau (in his own voice)

Context

Thoreau is laying out his philosophy of deliberate, stripped-down living at Walden Pond. The line precedes his famous prescription: "Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen."

How the repetition works

The triple "simplicity" is itself an exercise in what it preaches — no decoration, no qualification, just the word repeated until it commands attention. The repetition turns a single noun into a manifesto. It is the rhetorical equivalent of pruning everything inessential.