Simplicity, Simplification Quotes

If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it.

We need the tonic of wildness.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

I am somebody who is not too fond of fancy or commercial stuff, like dancing around trees. Even in the 20 films I have done in South, none had any of such stuff.

When mundane, lowly activities are at stake, too much insight is detrimental — far-sightedness errs in immediate concerns.

In his personal habits, Mr. Lincoln is as simple as a child…his food is plain and nutritious. He never drinks intoxicating liquors of any sort… He is not addicted to tobacco.

In a calm sea every man is a pilot.

Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you're not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied. In the spiritual life, discipline means to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn't planned or counted on.

It was my mom who told me, "Ernie, if you make even one person happy with your smile or a funny thing you did every day, you'll have accomplished a great deal." And that's all I've ever tried to do.

When one's expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have.

I'm not into the money thing. You can only sleep in one bed at a time. You can only eat one meal at a time, or be in one car at a time. So I don't have to have millions of dollars to be happy. All I need are clothes on my back, a decent meal, and a little loving when I feel like it. That's the bottom line.

I never wanted to be rich or successful or famous. I just wanted to be happy and have fun.

A lot of critics think I'm stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

An honest man is always a child.

If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things -- praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts -- not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They might break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

You are very familiar with Western ways, but you are too young. You go everywhere to follow the big news, but the questions you ask are too simple -- sometimes naive.

Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

If people would reflect that one can only do one thing at a time and therefore there is never more than one thing to do at a time, there would be less fatigue in the world.

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.

Start where you are, use what you have.

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea‑shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Live simply, love generously, care deeply, speak kindly, leave the rest to God.

True happiness is born of letting go of what is unnecessary.