Simplicity Quotes

As much as we all talk about the future and how so many things are merging, there is a simplicity that is crucial. ~ Ryan Seacrest

In the mind of a scientist, beauty is simplicity. The most elegant experiment is the one that takes no time to set up and gives the answer to every question. ~ Weike Wang

I can't write from the subconscious actually, because a lot of the time when I co-write with other people, I'm writing for them as opposed to for myself. When it comes to lyrics, I tend to want to give them their voice, since it's most likely going to be on their record, or somebody else's record. And I find for more commerial-style music, people want simplicity, less vagueness, and less space to fill between the lines, so to speak. So I can't be quite as ethereal and mystical. ~ Gary Louris

We should go into His presence as a child goes to his father. We do it with reverence and godly fear, of course, but we should go with a childlike confidence and simplicity. ~ David Lloyd-Jones

You're trying to make your painting too complicated. Paintings get complicated all by themselves. ~ Toni Onley

Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity. Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and sidewalks. Give me plastics, periodical tables, TV dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark corners: no ghosts. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

I strive for simplicity and believe simplicity is beauty. ~ Allan Alder

the simplicity of many of Bush's pronouncements is often misinterpreted as evidence that he has penetrated to the core of a complex issue, when in fact exactly the opposite is true: They often mark his refusal even to consider complexity. And that's particularly troubling in a world where the challenges America faces are often quite complex and require rigorous, sustained, disciplined analysis. ~ Al Gore

Do you understand what's going on here?"
Hodgesaargh took another slow look at the scene. "No," he said.
"In that case's not my job to understand this sort of thing," said the falconer. "I wasn't trained. Probably takes a lot of training, understanding this. That's your job. And her job. Can you understand what's going on when a bird's been trained and'll make a kill and still came back to the wrist?"
"Well, no - "
"There you are, then. So that's all right. Cup of tea, was it? ~ Terry Pratchett

One of the purest souls ever to live on this fallen planet was Nicholas Herman, known as Brother Lawrence. He wrote very little, but what he wrote has seemed to several generations of Christians to be so rare and so beautiful as to deserve a place near the top among the world's great books of devotion. The writings of Brother Lawrence are the ultimate in simplicity; ideas woven like costly threads to make a pattern of great beauty. ~ A.W. Tozer

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed. ~ Joseph Heller

The key to a good meal is simplicity and the right seasoning. ~ Buddy Valastro

Writing that flirts with incoherence can just as readily flounder as writing characterized by simplicity and composure. There is no reliable formula for originality, and strategies that are distinguished as innovative in their first incarnation can quickly become stale in the hands of lesser artists. ~ Joanna Scott

To be at one with God is to be at peace. The child simplicity is the greatest agency in bringing this full and complete realization, the child simplicity that recognizes its true relations with the Father's life. There are people I know who have come into such a conscious realization of their oneness with this Infinite Life, this Spirit of Infinite Peace, that their lives are fairly bubbling over with joy. ~ Ralph Waldo Trine

Anything simple always interests me. ~ David Hockney

Simplicity, clarity, singleness: These are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy as they are also the marks of great art. They seem to be the purpose of God for his whole creation. ~ Richard Holloway

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. ~ Henry David Thoreau

For simplicity one can think of the + class as having one extra base at some point or other in the genetic message and the - class as having one too few. ~ Francis Crick

Man's wisdom detracts from the glory of God, who is more honoured by the simplicity of the gospel, than luxuriance of wit. ~ Stephen Charnock

I love the simplicity of Kevin Spacey's work. He really does a subtle interpretation of every character, and that's kind of my style of acting when it comes to dramatic roles. ~ Devon Bostick

[Skinner] does not invoke other events, processes, or mechanisms which are hypothesized or invented for the purpose of mediating between behavior and its empirical determinants. This omission is sometimes misconstrued as a denial that mediating mechanisms exist; they obviously do, they are obviously neurological and they are also obviously themselves lawful. ...The argument [against employing them as part of scientific practice] is simplicity itself... [Skinner] considers such theoretical terms unnecessary; they may generate research whose only usefulness is to disconfirm the mediating entity or redefine it without increasing our knowledge of behavior's controlling variables; they can become the absorbing focus of an inquiry and so deflect attention from behavior itself; they can become a "refuge from the data". ~ Kenneth MacCorquodale

If we make one criterion for defining the artist the impulse to make something new, or to do something in a new way - a kind of divine discontent with all that has gone before, however good - then we can find such artists at every level of human culture, even when performing acts of great simplicity. ~ Margaret Mead

There was an air of luxury about the room, but it was the luxury of expert simplicity. ~ Ayn Rand

The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play. ~ James Kirk

Ordinary psyches often react to bad news with a momentary thrill, seeing the world, for once, in jagged clarity, as if lightning has just struck. But then darkness and dysfunction rush in. A mind such as Beethoven's remains illumined, or sees in the darkness shapes it never saw before, which inspire rather than terrify. This altered shape (raptus, he would say) makes art of the shapes, while holding in counterpoise such dualities as intellect and intuition, the conscious and the unconscious, mental health and mental disorder, the conventional and the unconventional, complexity and simplicity. ~ Edmund Morris

The Consul felt a pang. Ah, to have a horse, and gallop away, singing, to someone you loved perhaps, into the heart of all the simplicity and peace in the world; was that not like the opportunity afforded man by life itself? Of course not. Still, just for a moment, it had seemed that it was. ~ Malcolm Lowry

The structures were austere and simple, until one looked at them and realized what work, what complexity of method, what tension of thought had achieved the simplicity. ~ Ayn Rand

We all know that the 'divine glory of the ego' is socially a great nuisance; we all do actually value our friends for modesty, freshness, and simplicity of heart. Whatever may be the reason, we all do warmly respect humility in other people. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity. ~ Rem Koolhaas

One must first seek to love plants and nature, and then to cultivate that happy peace of mind which is satisfied with little. He will be happier if he has no rigid and arbitrary ideals, for gardens are coquettish, particularly with the novice. ~ Liberty Hyde Bailey

Happiness is an inner perception. It comes from simplicity, kindness, love, and compassion. ~ Debasish Mridha

The difference between a good and a poor architect is that the poor architect succumbs to every temptation and the good one resists it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wise men count backward toward zero. They know that's where contentment lies. ~ Marty Rubin

What I like so much about Corot is that he can say everything with a bit of tree; and it was Corot himself that I found in the museum of Naples - in the simplicity of the work of Pompeii and the Egyptians. These priestesses in their silver-grey tunics are just like Corot's nymphs. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Preach with authority. The authority for us is the Word of God. Preach with simplicity ... Preach with urgency ... heaven and hell are at stake. Preach for a decision. ~ Billy Graham

Pop doesn't really look back. It can't. What makes pop work is simplicity. ~ Branford Marsalis

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything) ~ T. S. Eliot

Use common sense; don't magnify the importance of insignificant details; don't worry about bygones; and keep it simple. Focus, common sense, simplicity, and attitude ~ Jean Edward Smith

But there was a sense of something tipping out of balance. The times seemed out of joint. There was too much decadence. Too much intensity. Too much change. Too much happiness juxtaposed with too much misery. Too much wealth next to too much poverty. The world was becoming faster and louder, and the social systems were becoming as chaotic and fragmented as jazz scores. So there was a craving, in some places, for simplicity, for order, for scapegoats and for bully-boy leaders, for nations to become like religions or cults. It happened every now and then.
It seemed, in the 1930s, that the whole course of humanity was at stake. As it very often does today. Too many people wanted to find an easy answer to complicated questions. It was a dangerous time to be human. To feel or to think or to care. ~ Matt Haig

to always say yes to finding and imitating exceptional models, to say yes to working for world peace, to say yes to living in simplicity, to say yes to taking the time to listen, to say yes to committing acts of kindness, to say yes to staying foolish and hungry, to understand that it's okay to occasionally make a mess of things, to say yes to taking action, and, more importantly, to go forth and make your life a story that inspires others. ~ Jill Cooper

Owning less is better than organizing more. ~ Joshua Becker

I've seen her in the middle of the night and the middle of the day, with makeup and without, with her hair done up and when it's been unwashed for days. I've seen her in jeans and in silk and in nothing. I would gladly spend the rest of my life just looking at her. ~ Michelle Hodkin

Life always refused simplicity. ~ Julian Barnes

Men rush towards complexity, but they yearn towards simplicity. They try to be kings; but they dream of being shepherds. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

When the tribal groups of december trade
Seated in the figure of crocodile
And songs are sung and deals discussed, are made
Real. All ... For more than one reason they smile.
These codes are writ in secret, feeling fine
To keep what's private to my self since we
All must face our maker in our own ryhme
And reasons for being ( from regrets) free
So let the memory of your glory
Be the tenderness heartfelt love starkly
In the sky of my mind vast and pretty
Evermore glittering simplicity
Where in the truth of country grows sober
And sunshines through fog to radiate wonder ~ John Armstrong

We ought to act with God in the greatest simplicity, speak to Him frankly and plainly, and implore His assistance in our affairs. ~ Brother Lawrence

Your love in a cottage is hungry,
Your vine is a nest for flies-
Your milkmaid shocks the Graces,
And simplicity talks of pies!
You lie down to your shady slumber
And wake with a bug in your ear,
And your damsel that walks in the morning
Is shod like a mountaineer. ~ Nathaniel Parker Willis

Live simply that others might simply live. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified. ~ William James

Simplicity is the essence of universality. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

You can't get old without living. ~ Jim Brown

Chess is a game with simple rules and pieces, a small sixty-four-space board, but there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe. ~ Austin Grossman

Contrary to popular stereotypes, seeking simplicity doesn't require that you become a monk, a subsistence forager, or a wild-eyed revolutionary. Nor does it mean that you must unconditionally avoid the role of consumer. Rather, simplicity merely requires a bit of personal sacrifice: an adjustment of your habits and routines within consumer society itself. ~ Rolf Potts

When I went to Memphis and Mississippi and Nashville, I learnt the blues is a whole way of life. I don't really have the blues, but I can appreciate the honesty and the simplicity of it. ~ Gin Wigmore

To abandon the principle of simplicity would be to abandon all reasoning about the external world ~ Jim Holt

All my own perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded upon Our Lady. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

The simplicity of meditation means just experiencing the ape instinct of ego. ~ Chogyam Trungpa

It would be a sign of great simplicity to think that the world was created in six days, or indeed at all in time; [ ... ] Time is a thing posterior to the world. Therefore it would be correctly said that the world was not created in time, but that time had its existence in consequence of the world. For it is the motion of the heaven that has displayed the nature of time. ~ Philo

Bicycle means simplicity and simplicity means happiness! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

It's the simplest things that can convey a message…. ~ Peter Cimino

In law, we talk about a beautiful summation, or a beautiful judgment: and what we mean by that, of course, is the loveliness of not only its logic but its expression. And similarly, in math, when we talk about a beautiful proof, what we're recognizing is the simplicity of the proof, its ... elementalness, I suppose: its inevitability. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Love sticks around even when it has a lot to put up with. ~ Chip Ingram

When Inej was on the high wire, it became her world. She could feel its tilt and pull. It was a planet and she was its moon. There was a simplicity to it that she never felt on the swings, where she was carried away by momentum. She loved the stillness she could find on the wire, and it was something no one else understood. She had fallen only once, and she ~ Leigh Bardugo

This life is short, but it contains everything. There is an inherent beauty in simplicity. Choose your path wisely; often the simple route is the most beautiful path to follow. ~ Joshua Fields Millburn

In God's great plan, every detail is important, even yours, even my humble little witness, even the hidden witness of those who live their faith with simplicity in everyday family relationships, work relationships, friendships. There are the saints of every day, the "hidden" saints, a sort of "middle class of holiness" to which we can all belong. ~ Pope Francis

As though frustrated by so much rustic simplicity, though, one of the chefs had provided a charming hors d'oeuvre - a nest, cunningly built from strips of pastry, ornamented with real sprigs of flowering apple, on the edge of which perched two nightingales, skinned and roasted, stuffed with apple and cinnamon, then redressed in their feathers. And in the nest was the entire family of baby birds, tiny stubs of outstretched wings brown and crispy, tender bare skins glazed with honey, blackened mouths agape to show the merest hint of the almond-paste stuffing within. ~ Diana Gabaldon

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity. ~ Tony Hoare

The intention of this way of life [voluntary simplicity] is not to dogmatically live with less. It's a more demanding intention of living with balance. This is a middle way that moves between the extremes of poverty and indulgence. ~ Duane Elgin

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta (the same boy grown to manhood), who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together. ~ Beryl Markham

Very well, then: why are you attached to any one book, or to the words and ways of one saint when he himself tells you to let them go and walk in simplicity? To hang on to him as if to make a method of him is to contradict him and to go in the opposite direction to the one in which he would have you travel. ~ Thomas Merton

Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this is a far cry from the contents of religion. I don't believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him. ~ Wolfgang Pauli

If we can make something decentralised, out of control, and of great simplicity, we must be prepared to be astonished at whatever might grow out of that new medium."34 ~ Thomas J. Misa

It is what it is, no more, no less, it simply is. Embrace simplicity, life is easier that way. ~ Hazel Butterworth

It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I wished to acquire the simplicity, native feelings, and virtues of savage life; to divest myself of the factitious habits, prejudices and imperfections of civilization; ... and to find, amidst the solitude and grandeur of the western wilds, more correct views of human nature and of the true interests of man. The season of snows was preferred, that I might experience the pleasure of suffering, and the novelty of danger. ~ Estwick Evans

Simplicity and sexiness, that's what people want. At a price that's not outrageous. ~ Diane Von Furstenberg

When you get pushed down, you pick yourself up and move on. I've never been a victim. ~ Sharon Osbourne

She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew. ~ Terence McKenna

I think that a person who is attached to riches, who lives with the worry of riches, is actually very poor. If this person puts his money at the service of others, then he is rich, very rich. ~ Mother Teresa

Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity tohistory, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth. ~ Victor Hugo

A boat, for all its complexity, is in fact a version of simplicity, but of a satisfyingly complex kind. Get to know the hundreds of ways in which a boat-at-sea works and you become its master and commander. A boat provides control in what looks like uncontrollable circumstances. It is the mirror image of the realities of life on land, which look easier but are, psychologically, far more difficult, more subtle, less visible, and less predictable. The boat, in other words, is the haven from the storms at home. And because a boat's workings are a mystery, in the old sense that it is an arcane art, with its own equipment and vocabulary, its nostrums and obscurities from which the vulgar are excluded, it is also a source of potency and seduction. ~ Adam Nicolson

The periodic table was incredibly beautiful, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I could never adequately analyze what I meant here by beauty – simplicity? coherence? rhythm? inevitability? Or perhaps it was the symmetry, the comprehensiveness of every element firmly locked into its place, with no gaps, no exceptions, everything implying everything else. ~ Oliver Sacks

Out of the freedom from worry that God's generosity provides comes an impulse toward simplicity rather than accumulation. ~ John Piper

The leader is one who, out of the clutter, brings simplicity ... out of discord, harmony ... and out of difficulty, opportunity. ~ Albert Einstein

I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort ~ Clarice Lispector

Wild Things in Captivity

Wild things in captivity
while they keep their own wild purity
won't breed, they mope, they die.

All men are in captivity,
active with captive activity,
and the best won't breed, though they don't know why.

The great cage of our domesticity
kills sex in a man, the simplicity
of desire is distorted and twisted awry.

And so, with bitter perversity,
gritting against the great adversity,
they young ones copulate, hate it, and want to cry.

Sex is a state of grace.
In a cage it can't take place.
Break the cage then, start in and try. ~ D.H. Lawrence

A brown spotted lady-bug climbed the dizzy height of a grass blade, and Tom bent down close to it and said, "Lady-bug, lady-bug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children's alone," and she took wing and went off to see about it
which did not surprise the boy, for he knew of old that this insect was credulous about conflagrations, and he had practised upon its simplicity more than once. ~ Mark Twain

I am very pleased you like my stories. They are studies in prose, put for Romance's sake into fanciful form: meant partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy, and who find simplicity in a subtle strangeness. ~ Oscar Wilde

I could sing you a thousand and one doo-wop songs. I love the simplicity in that music. It's not super-poetic, it's just from the heart. ~ Bruno Mars

Measures are an innovation that changed a world of innocent and noble simplicity into one forever filled with dishonesty. ~ Josephus

Generally speaking, our stuff can be divided into three categories: useful stuff, beautiful stuff, and emotional stuff. ~ Francine Jay

It takes simplicity and humility to worship God acceptably. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

Simplicity provides the highest sophistication, the greatest elegance, after all. ~ L.M. Elliott

To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place.
In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable. ~ Dag Hammarskjold

Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos. ~ Eric Temple Bell

never overlook the power of simplicity ~ Robin S. Sharma

Whenever a decision is made in the heat of the moment - when we allow ourselves to be carried on joy or sorrow or mere simplicity and quiet - whatever it is, a moment of magic is created. Not always good magic, of course. But magic, nonetheless. ~ J. Grace Pennington

Simpler companies are user centered. They adapt to the needs of day-to-day decision makers. ~ Bill Jensen

When the peasants and their song had vanished from his sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of anguish at his loneliness, his bodily idleness, his hostility to this world, came over him ... It was all drowned in the sea of cheerful common labor. God had given the day, God had given the strength. Both day and strength had been devoted to labour and in that lay the reward ... Levin had often admired this life, had often experienced a feeling of envy for the people who lived this life, but that day for the first time ... the thought came clearly to Levin that it was up to him to change that so burdensome, idle, artificial and individual life he lived into this laborious, pure and common, lovely life. ~ Leo Tolstoy