Simplicity Quotes

The world is full of people who will help you manufacture tornados in order to blow out a match.

~ Shaun Hick

Perhaps success is best defined as maximizing the ratio of your rear wheel horsepower to your engine horsepower. Higher %, happier times.

~ Tim Fargo

Extreme right-wingers are known for giving God a bad name; extreme left-wingers are known for giving God a weak name. He's not as simple as conservative versus liberal, old versus new. His wings are balanced. God is both and neither.

~ Criss Jami

Any darn fool can make something complex, it takes a genius to make something simple.

~ Pete Seeger

What is a genius? A person who demands little to nothing from others, but is often found extremely difficult to have around.

~ Criss Jami

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.

~ Edsger W. Dijkstra

For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call the Shaker staircase in Pleasant Hill elegant because we know--without ever having constructed one ourselves--that a staircase is a site complexity, and that combinations of treads, risers and banisters rarely approach the sober intelligibility of the Sharkers' work. We deem a modern Swiss house elegant because we not how seamlessly its windows have been joined to their concrete walls, and how neatly the usual clutter of construction has been resolved away. We admire starkly simple works that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated. (p 209)

~ Alain De Botton

Water’s water and that’s why it’s beautiful.

~ Alberto Caeiro

One of the reasons to see improved productivity in Agile is because of the simplicity principle.

~ Pearl Zhu

Life is indeed terribly complicated—to a man who has lost his principles.

~ G.k. Chesterton

To simplify your life, just think of yourself as a four-year-old child. Try to imagine the way he thinks of reality. If you have to talk to someone about a so-called complicated matter, see how you can simplify it.No matter with whom you are talking, feel that you are a child and that person is also a child. When a childlike quality comes into your life, everything automatically becomes simple.

~ Sri Chinmoy

Through the ingenuousness of her age beamed an ardent mind, a mind not of the women but of the poet; she did not please, she intoxicated.

~ Alexandre Dumas

...pretention is very close to stupidity and that simplicity has a less visible but still gratifying aspect.

~ Marcel Proust

Most things that are true are simple. To lose weight, eat less than you burn. To reduce stress, find a job you love. To resolve conflict, be patient and peaceful. These are very, very simple in that they are complete concepts that take no more than a sentence to say. They are not, however, easy, because they must be applied consistently.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.

~ Coco Chanel

Don't buy much but make sure that what you buy is good.

~ Christian Dior

You must speak straight so that your words may go as sunlight into our hearts.

~ Cochise (Like Ironweed)

You’re a clever strategist, but not all battles require tricks. Sometimes the simplest way to kill something is to swim up to it and bite it in half.

~ Shaun Hick

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

~ Henry David Thoreau

The meaning of life is simply the meaning we give to it.

~ Bryant Mcgill

What's really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer.

~ William Albert Allard

Why Worry?If its better when simpler.

~ Mahrukh

If you have clutter in your real life, your tangible life, then it really adds to the emotional clutter in your mind.

~ Giuliana Rancic

The cities make ferocious men because they may corrupt man. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they development fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.

~ Victor Hugo

Without a little chaos life will be dull, unbeautiful, for we have been trained not to align with simplicity for too long.

~ Paul Bamikole

If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.

~ Albert Einstein

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

~ Clare Boothe Luce

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.

~ John Maeda

The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

~ Colum Mccann

A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace.

~ Confucius

It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town... he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety.

~ Henry David Thoreau

..things are never as complicated as they seem. It is only our arrogance that prompts us to find unnecessarily complicated answers to simple problems.

~ Muhammad Yunus

I am not a genius, I am just curious. I ask many questions. and when the answer is simple, then God is answering.

~ Albert Einstein

If you are a warrior, decency means that you are not cheating anybody at all. You are not even about to cheat anybody. There is a sense of straightforwardness and simplicity. With setting-sun vision, or vision based on cowardice, straightforwardness is always a problem. If people have some story or news to tell somebody else, first of all they are either excited or disappointed. Then they begin to figure out how to tell their news. They develop a plan, which leads them completely away from simply telling it. By the time a person hears the news, it is not news at all, but opinion. It becomes a message of some kind, rather than fresh, straightforward news. Decency is the absence of strategy. It is of utmost importance to realize that the warrior’s approach should be simple-minded sometimes, very simple and straightforward. That makes it very beautiful: you having nothing up your sleeve; therefore a sense of genuineness comes through. That is decency.

~ Chögyam Trungpa

Complex things are easy to do. Simplicity's the real challenge.

~ Robert James Waller

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

Life is simple. You just have to stop trying to figure it out.

~ Marty Rubin

The eastern sky was red as coals in a forge, lighting up the flats along the river. Dew had wet the million needles of the chaparral, and when the rim of the sun edged over the horizon the chaparral seemed to be spotted with diamonds. A bush in the backyard was filled with little rainbows as the sun touched the dew.It was tribute enough to sunup that it could make even chaparral bushes look beautiful, Augustus thought, and he watched the process happily, knowing it would only last a few minutes. The sun spread reddish-gold light through the shining bushes, among which a few goats wandered, bleating. Even when the sun rose above the low bluffs to the south, a layer of light lingered for a bit at the level of the chaparral, as if independent of its source. The the sun lifted clear, like an immense coin. The dew quickly died, and the light that filled the bushes like red dirt dispersed, leaving clear, slightly bluish air.It was good reading light by then, so Augustus applied himself for a few minutes to the Prophets. He was not overly religious, but he did consider himself a fair prophet and liked to study the styles of his predecessors. They were mostly too long-winded, in his view, and he made no effort to read them verse for verse—he just had a look here and there, while the biscuits were browning.

~ Larry Mcmurtry

Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.

~ George Eliot