Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes

Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one.

My first wish is to be simple in my actions, truthful in my speech, honest in my opinions, and natural in my behavior. In other words, I want to be clean in mind, heart, and body.

A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules.

I am a great believer in the simplicity of things and as you probably know I am inclined to hang on to broad & simple ideas like grim death until evidence is too strong for my tenacity.

The best ideas and the most useful and ground-breaking are often, though not always, in one sense, very simple ideas.

Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple

Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication. -Aunt Beast

Simple ideas are easier to understand. Ideas that are easier to understand are repeated. Ideas that are repeated change the world.

In any case, the idea of giving "all" of reality is overly simple and absurd.

To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.

I really like the idea of banality and repetition being used to generate the image, which are simple and unobstructed and not captivated by composition.

Whenever I attempt to frame a simple idea of time, abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly, and is participated by all beings, I am lost and embrangled in inextricable difficulties.

I started passing out the schematics and the code listings for the computer, telling everyone here it is. It's small, it's simple, it's inexpensive: Build your own. No idea to start a company. Steve Jobs came by later and say, you know, people are interested. Why don't we start a company?

What strikes me most about Best Buddies International is the simplicity and magnitude of the mission. Friendship is a simple idea.

It is not at all simple to understand the simple.

I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.

You're not asking me to guess the mind of Matrim Cauthon, are you?" Elayne asked. "I'm convinced that Mat only acts simple so that people will let him get away with more.

Big ideas are usually simple ideas.

The sun is simple. A sword is simple. A storm is simple. Behind everything simple is a huge tail of complicated.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching.

The ability of nonintelligent people to understand the most complicated mechanisms and to use them has always been to me a cause of astonishment: their inability to understand simple questions is even more astonishing. The general acceptance of simple ideas is difficult and rare, and yet it is only when simple, fundamental, ideas have been accepted that further progress becomes possible on a higher level.

My natural tendency is to complicate everything--and then to spray words and ideas onto everything afterwards. I've had to develop the habit of keeping things simple.

The Simple Life is not a simple life.

Hemingway, damn his soul, makes everything he writes terrifically exciting (and incidentally makes all us second-raters seem positively adolescent) by the seemingly simple expedient of the iceberg principle - three-fourths of the substance under the surface. He comes closer that way to retaining the magic of the original, unexpressed idea or emotion, which is always more stirring than any words. But just try and do it!