simplicity

1.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

- Hemingway, Ernest

2.

I don't understand complicated problems. I only understand simple ones.

- Deupree, Richard

3.

Simplicity is a pleasant thing in children, or at any age, but it is not necessarily admirable, nor is affectation altogether a thing of evil. To be normal, to be at home in the world, with a prospect of power, usefulness, or success, the person must have that imaginative insight into other minds that underlies tact and savoir-faire, morality and beneficence. This insight involves sophistication, some understanding and sharing of the clandestine impulses of human nature. A simplicity that is merely the lack of this insight indicates a sort of defect.

- Cooley, Charles Horton

4.

I paint from the top down. From the sky, then the mountains, then the hills, then the houses, then the cattle, and then the people.

- Moses, Grandma

5.

Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.

- Pound, Ezra

6.

It is no good asking for a simple religion. Real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not. The table I'm sitting at looks simple: but ask a scientist to tell you what it is really made of - all about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my eye and what they do to my optic nerve and what it does to my brain - and, of course, you'll find that what we call'seeing a table'lands you in mysteries and complications which you can hardly get to the end of. A child saying a child's prayer looks simple. And if you are content to stop there, well and good. But if you are not - and the modern world usually is not - if you want to go on and ask what is really happening - then you must be prepared for something difficult. If we ask for something more than simplicity, it is silly then to complain that the something is not more simple.

- C. S. Lewis

7.

Simplicity in character, in manners, in style; in all things the supreme excellence is simplicity.

- Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

8.

There comes a time when we must narrow our sphere of thought much, that we may truly enlarge it! we must, artificialised as we have been, return to the rudiments of life, to children's pleasures, that we may find easily, through their transparent simplicity, spiritual laws which we may apply to the more intricate spheres of art and science.

- MS. Letter. 1842.

9.

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately.

- Ruskin, John

10.

The whole is simpler than the sum of its parts.

- Gibbs, Willard

11.

I have revered always not crude verbosity, but holy simplicity.

- Saint Jerome

12.

I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.

- James, Henry

13.

Simplicity is the intention, purity in the affection; simplicity turns to God, purity unites with and enjoys him.

- Kempis, Thomas

14.

Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity.

- Christopher Zeeman

15.

Intellectual comradeship requires that you think your thoughts through to the place where you can make the complex seem simple, the obscure quite clear.

- Seabury, David

16.

Unnecessary possessions are unnecessary burdens. If you have them, you have to take care of them! There is great freedom in simplicity of living. It is those who have enough but not too much who are the happiest.

- Pilgrim, Peace

17.

The great seal of truth is simplicity.

- Boerhaave, Herman

18.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.

- Thoreau, Henry David

19.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, not even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

- Henry David Thoreau

20.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

- Lee, Bruce