Quotes About Simplicity

The great man is always the good man; he is always simple. He draws from, nay, lives in, the inexhaustible fountain of divine Goodness within; he inhabits the Heavenly Places; communes with the vanished great ones; lives with the Invisible: he is inspired, and breathes the airs of Heaven.

LIFE is simple. Being is simple. The universe is simple. Complexity arises in ignorance and self-delusion.

And now he casts from him, one after another, his opinions and speculations, and commences to live the life of perfect love toward all beings. With each opinion overcome and abandoned as a burden, there is an increased lightness of spirit, and he now begins to realize the meaning of being free.

There's a saying, "The learned man aims for more. But the wise man decreases. And then decreases again.

I'm trying to have fewer things in my life right now. This doesn't always mean fewer trinkets that shine on a shelf. It also might mean fewer things that upset me. Fewer people who bother me. Fewer regrets about things that are long dead and buried. Fewer anxieties about a future that may or may not exist.

The learned man aims for more. But the wise man decreases. And then decreases again." Everyone

Your mind desperately wants to be the BOSS. It needs you to be very, VERY BUSY with BS stuff

In some cultures, like Buddhism, you want things in your life to disappear, to reduce your needs and desires

It's much better to work smarter, not harder.

The learned man aims for more. But the wise man decreases. And then decreases again.

Spiritually we need to recognize the importance of wanting less in our lives, to the point that we want to disappear.

As Nassim Taleb mentioned to me on our podcast, "many people drive two miles to the gym in order to walk two miles on a treadmill." Just walk.

So the first thing is to spend less energy digesting food. Skip dinner (so your body is not trying to digest when you sleep), go to sleep early, don't expose yourself to news, avoid pop culture, don't drink alcohol, try to only be around the people you love, and have a sense of surrender and gratitude.

All for the first time, in the days when acts had no consequences and nothing was irrecoverable, and love was simple and even pain had the dignity of enduring forever: it was unimaginable that time could do anything to diminish it.

Most people are not naturally reflective any more than they are naturally malicious, and the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his forefathers, or his neighbors.

It is axiomatic that the Negro is religious, which is to say that he stands in fear of the God our ancestors gave us and before whom we all tremble yet. There are probably more churches in Harlem than in any other ghetto in this city and they are going full blast every night and some of them are filled with praying people every day. This, supposedly, exemplifies the Negro's essential simplicity and good-will; but it is actually a fairly desperate emotional business.

Non serve cercar di andare troppo a fondo in questo mistero che è tanto poco semplice quanto poco innocuo. Non sappiamo abbastanza di noi stessi. Credo sia meglio esser consci di non saperne niente, così si può crescere con il mistero e intanto il mistero cresce in te. Ma la giorno d'oggi, naturalmente, tutti sanno tutto ed è per questo che tanta gente si perde.

doesn't do to look too hard into this mystery, which is as far from being simple as it is from being safe. We don't know enough about ourselves. I think it's better to know that you don't know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that's why so many people are so lost.

I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and to rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it.

large part of her simplicity consisted in determining not to want what she could not have with ease. So

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

Simplicity is king. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal. (in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review)

As your experience about writing accrues) you learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn't know you had.

but is simplicity enough?