Quotes About Simplicity

two rules of harmony. #1) Don't sweat the small stuff, and #2) It's all small stuff.

In the beginning was simplicity.

A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!

Why did it take so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene? What delayed humanity's tumbling to that luminously simple idea which seems, on the face of it, so much easier to grasp than the mathematical ideas given us by Newton two centuries earlier - or, indeed, by Archimedes two millennia earlier?

Parsimony is always in the forefront of a scientist's mind when choosing between theories, but it isn't always obvious how to judge it.

A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple.

It comes from natural selection: the process which, as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity.

obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity.

As he made his way, he ploughed his bare feet through the mud as a child, head bowed as a child, interested as a child neither in where he was going nor in what might happen next but only in the furrow his foot opened that vanished a moment later.

In the thirties, after they were married, they lived simply and only for each other and for the day. They drank some, lived on the road with my father's salesman's job. They had a good time and felt they had little to look back on, and didn't look.

Together—though perhaps only together—they were fully formed. They stayed on the road. Life went on as it had, from the thirties straight into the forties. They owned little—a bit of furniture, their clothes, no car.

Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast—you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.

I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck. EMMA GOLDMAN

I can be satisfied by small steps—in fact, very satisfied.

Trying to do "one more thing," we do much less.

Practice being kind to yourself in small, concrete ways. Look at your refrigerator. Are you feeding yourself nicely? Do you have socks? An extra set of sheets? What about a new house plant? A thermos for the long drive to work? Allow yourself to pitch out some of your old ragged clothes. You don't have to keep everything.

Clutter is the enemy of clarity.

Scraping a carrot, peeling an apple—these actions are quite literally food for thought.

What gives us true joy?

But my favorite remained the basic roast chicken. What a deceptively simple dish. I had come to believe that one can judge the quality of a cook by his or her roast chicken. Above all, it should taste like chicken: it should be so good that even a perfectly simple, buttery roast should be a delight.

Morty trusted trees far more than he did people. 'You know what a tree can and cannot give you,' he said in one interview. 'It's very straightforward that way. And I am not talking about that cruel Silverstein book, one of the only children's books I've ever thought ought to be banned.

Darling,' when Charlie said it, felt like a whirlpool of rapture. Whenever Greenie answered the phone, he would say just that word, and Greenie would say 'You,' which was her way of expressing that he was now the world to her, that he was the one for whom she was always waiting, that he was the high cliff on which she was happy to stand and from which she had come to realize she might, at any moment, jump. Jump with open eyes and outspread arms.

Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.

Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.