- “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, Walden
- “My task is to simplify and then go deeper, making a commitment to what remains. That’s what I’ve been after. To care and polish what remains till it glows and comes alive from loving care.” ― Sue Bender, Plain and Simple: A Journey to the Amish
- Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities. Mark Twain
- “We ought to compliment and not to compete with one another.” ― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
- If everything is important, then nothing is. Patrick M. Lencioni
- Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life. Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould
- “Simplicity is all but nothing that’s there.” ― Shawn Lukas
- “The river of my village doesn’t make you think about anything.When you’re at its bank you’re only at its bank.” ― Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep
- Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough. Charles Warner
- In order to be a good gatekeeper, you have to think of your house as sacred space, not storage space. Francine Jay (Miss Minimalist)
- “The secret to good writing is to use small words for big ideas, not to use big words for small ideas.” ― Oliver Markus
- “He wants everything to be so simple—as, alas, it never is in real life!” ― Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading
- “You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger’s passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.” ― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
- “There are simple things. There are simpler things. There are more simpler things.” ― Yuri Polchenko
- “Do I believe a thing has limits!? Of course! Nothing exists that doesn’t have limits. Existence means there’s always something else, and so everything has limits. Why is it so hard to conceive that a thing is a thing, and that it isn’t always being some other thing that’s beyond it?”At that moment I felt in my bones not that I was talking to a man, but to another universe. I tried one last time, from another angle, which I felt compelled to consider legitimate.“Look, Caeiro… think about numbers… Where do they end? Take any number — say 34. Past it we have 35, 36, 37, 38 — there can be no end to it. There is no number so big that there is no number larger…““But that’s just numbers,” protested my master Caeiro.And then, looking at me out of his formidable, childlike eyes:“What is 34 in Reality, anyway?” ― Álvaro de Campos
- “I’ve heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you’ve spoiled what was pure and simple; and without the pure and simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest.” ― Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
- “You can never get enough generality. The more general solution the better. The solution to existence is the most general solution of all, the solution least infected by particularity. That is its defining quality. The entire way of thinking mathematically – in terms of simplicity, generality, tautology, elegance, beauty, stability, the eternal, the necessary, coherence, the analytic, the a priori – is totally different from the way a scientist thinks, which is always mired in particularity, inelegance, ugliness, the temporal, the contingent, the ad hoc, the arbitrary, the heuristic, the speculative; in Feynman’s crude guessing game.” ― Thomas Stark, What Is Mathematics?: The Greatest Detective Story Never Told
- “Less judgement more compassion.” ― Nikki Rowe
- “The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, ‘If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.’Said [author:Diogenes|3213618, ‘Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king”.” ― Anthony de Mello
- “…it’s really more intelligent to be able to simplify things than to complicate them. Even if some people think it makes you look stupid.” ― Eugenia Cheng, How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics
- “A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace.” ― Confucius
- “The human mind is an open-source network of many complex softwares working together.” ― Sukant Ratnakar, Quantras
- The highest excellence is like water. The excellence of water appears in its benefiting all things, and in its occupying, without striving, the low place which all men dislike. Lao Tzu
- “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system” ― John Gall, The Systems Bible: The Beginner’s Guide to Systems Large and Small: Being the Third Edition of Systemantics
- The more intentional you are in your choices, the more every change makes room for more changes I just love that there’s this endless potential. Dee Williams, https://padtinyhouses.com/dee-williams/
- “Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.” ― Neil deGrasse Tyson
- “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, Chemistry
- The most important things in life aren’t things. Kenneth Clarke
- “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, The Architecture of Happiness
- “Simplicity is the friend of execution” ― Sesan Kareem