The Bare Essentials

Expensive garments, jewellery, and adornments make a statement regarding the social status of the so-adorned individual. Clothes can be a visual declaration of monetary wealth. Gymnosophically speaking, money and the ostentatious attire it buys are of no concern, while the spiritual life and feelings of unrestricted joy are of the utmost.
- Theoron Felson

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.
- Henry David Thoreau

Sometimes naked, sometimes mad,
Now the scholar, now the fool;
Thus they appear on earth: 
The free men! 
- Shankara

Full nakedness! All my joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be,
To taste whole joys.
- John Donne

Adam and Eve entered the world naked and unashamed — naked and pure-minded. And no descendant of theirs has ever entered it otherwise. All have entered it naked, unashamed, and clean in mind. They entered it modest. They had to acquire immodesty in the soiled mind; there was no other way to get it.
- Mark Twain

If people were meant to be nude, they would have been born this way.
- Oscar Wilde

Modesty died when clothes were born.
- Mark Twain

Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your skin and less of your raiment, 
For the breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in the wind... 
And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
- Khalil Gibran

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
- Genesis 2:25

What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?
- Michelangelo

In order to swim one takes off all one's clothes. In order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one's inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness, etc. before one is sufficiently naked.
- Søren Kierkegaard