Hal Borland Quotes

Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple.

Truth is too simple for us: we do not like those who unmask our illusions.

As any old Taoist walking out of the woods can tell you, simple-minded does not necessarily mean stupid.

I don't make things complicated, that's the way they get all by themselves.

Make the hard ones look easy and the easy ones look hard.

Everything is more complicated than it looks to most people.

Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.

I'm nothing more than what you actually see, but I am also the complete opposite.

Clearness is so often one of the characteristics of truth that often it even passes for truth itself.

Like simplicity and candor, and other much-commented qualities, enthusiasm is charming until we meet it face to face, and cannot escape from its charm.

I used to take everything at face value. Because, when I say something, I mean it... so I used to feel that everybody else meant what they said. But of course that wasn't true. And life isn't that sweet and simple.

In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.

The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine. The simplicity of nature is not that which may be easily read but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made.

What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.

We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.

The most perceptive character in a play is the fool, because the man who wishes to seem simple cannot possibly be a simpleton.

And simple truth miscalled simplicity

Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing.

Nothing is true, but that which is simple.

I am interested in the nature of things. The nature of something is quite different from the way it looks.

The truth is rarely true and never simple.

Nature is more subtle, more deeply intertwined and more strangely integrated than any of our pictures of her than any of our errors. It is not merely that our pictures are not full enough; each of our pictures in the end turns out to be so basically mistaken that the marvel is that it worked at all.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.

Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.

There is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature.