Quotes About Simplicity

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't. —Scientist Emerson M. Pugh

Time, which is so often an enemy in life, can also become our ally if we see how a pale moment can lead to a glowing moment, and then turn to a moment of perfect transparency, before dropping again to a moment of everyday simplicity.

I am not impressed by big words,' said my uncle, who was always ready enough to bandy 'predestination' and 'infralapsarianism.

What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it, that's another matter.

There it was, plain and beautifully simple, five generations down the line. :)

We should throw away our arcologies and our starships, and live like the Lord intended

It's wonderful to me that bees have this simple, age-old thing going on.

Every theoretical explanation is a reduction of intuition.

Europeans need easy explanations; they will always choose a simple lie over a contradictory truth.

Actually I think Art lies in both directions - the broad strokes, big picture but on the other hand the minute examination of the apparently mundane. Seeing the whole world in a grain of sand, that kind of thing.

These Days I mainly just talk to Plants and Dogs

No 'buts', Gilbert. You just make sense to me. It's nothing more special than that.

Describing Endora is like dancing to no music. It's a town where nothing much ever happens, and nothing much ever will.

It caught me sometimes: that this was okay. Just this. That simple beauty was still bearable barely, and that if I lived moment to moment, garden to stove to the simple act of flying, I could have peace.

Something like laughter. That a flower could be this small, this fleeting, that a snowflake could be so large, so persistent. The improbable simplicity. I groaned. Why don't we have a word for the utterance between laughing and crying?

She was very easy to please, because she took joy in the smallest things, but exacting, too, because that small thing must be authentic, and wondrous in its small self, and not any kind of bullshit. She could detect bullshit from a hillside away. But then she took people at face value and expected the best of them until proven otherwise.

Sometimes I think that's all you need. A good man with a fishing tip, a wave. A woman once in a while. Some work to do that might mean something. A truck that runs, that some faceless bastard two hundred miles away can't turn off. It's not much, but plenty when you don't have any of it.

Paulson said there was a principle in aesthetics: the more you prettify something, the more you risk undermining its value. Its essential value.

That simple beauty was still bearable barely, and that if I lived moment to moment, garden to stove to the simple act of flying, I could have peace.

We made love again. This time it was me who asked. Lying there again, on the bed, this time with heat, almost an oven heat, coming through the screen, and sweat instead of tears, I wondered how simple we really are. That we can do the same things again and again and again and find them interesting, even fascinating and seek the repetition with a hunger as avid. How fishing was like that, and painting.

I like to play chess. I moved to a small town, and nobody played chess there, but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That's sort of like living in a small town. It's a simpler game, but it's played to a higher level.

She wished, sometimes, that she could trust God, and surrender all her concerns to Him. How much simpler that would make everything.

Better to own a little that is dear to you than have all the potato fields of Sa Pobla.

This is a simple matter in the sight of the LORD, and He will also deliver the Moabites into your hand.