Quotes About Simplicity

The Buddha spoke about the practice of samtusta, recognizing that we have enough conditions to be happy right here and right now. We don't need to obtain any more. Samtusta has been translated as realizing that one is satisfied with little.

Learn to love, enjoy and embrace what you have in the here and now. That's all you really need to be happy.

But simple people don't understand complicated ones and thrust the latter back on themselves, more ruthlessly than any others, I thought. The biggest mistake is to think that one can be rescued by so-called simple people. A person goes to them in an extremely needy condition and begs desperately to be rescued and they thrust this person even more deeply into his own despair. And how are they supposed to save the extravagant one in his extravagance, I thought. Wertheimer

The forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter—that has always been my ideal.

Und ich denke heute, die Menschen, die in unserem Leben wirklich etwas bedeutet haben, können wir an den Fingern einer Hand abzählen und sehr oft sträubt sich sogar diese eine Hand gegen die Perversität, in welcher wir glauben, eine ganze Hand zum Abzählen dieser Menschen heranziehen zu müssen, wo wir doch, wenn wir ehrlich sind, wahrscheinlich ohne einen einzigen Finger auskommen.

If a model meets the criterion of simplicity it will often, like the thermostat-controlled heating system, describe physical and mechanical systems as well as social phenomena, animal behavior as well as human, scientific principles as well as household activities. An example is "critical mass.

Models tend to be useful when they are simultaneously simple enough to fit a variety of behaviors and complex enough to fit behaviors that need the help of an explanatory model.

time can be slowed if you live deliberately. If you stop and watch sunsets. If you spend time sitting on porches listening to the woods. If you give in to the reality of the seasons.

L'accumulation est le trésor paradoxal du pauvre ; les riches sont minimalistes.

People will always prefer black-and-white over shades of grey, and so there will always be the temptation to hold overly-simplified beliefs and to hold them with excessive confidence

One of the simplest and yet most powerful ways we do so lies in how we frame the very question we ask of the evidence. When we prefer to believe something, we may approach the relevant evidence by asking ourselves, "what evidence is there to support this belief?

He's charmed by her as if she were some fairy! continued Arabella. See how he looks round at her, and lets his eyes rest on her. I am inclined to think that she don't care for him quite so much as he does for her. She's not a particular warm-hearted creature to my thinking, though she cares for him pretty middling much-- as much as she's able to; and he could make her heart ache a bit if he liked to try--which he's too simple to do.

Bless thy simplicity, Tess

That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.

To see persons looking with children's eyes at any ordinary scenery, is a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new sensations from an old experience...

Cultivate the art of renunciation.

They are simple folk. Like beasts in a field, they are fascinated when a peacock lives amongst them.

Death and danger do not have to come with trappings.

The emperor counsels simplicity. First principles. Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its causal nature?

He cleared his throat. "One good thing about the range, Starling, is there's no politics out there." "No?" "You were right to secure that garage up at Baltimore there. You worried about the TV?

That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest. —Henry David Thoreau

I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet.

When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it.

I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds, and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasures of this gay capital [Paris].