984 Quotes About Simplicity

The role of genius is not to complicate the simple, but to simplify the complicated.

While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness. We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search for spiritual highs and extraordinary, mystical experiences but in our simple presence in life.

Through the ingenuousness of her age beamed an ardent mind, a mind not of the women but of the poet; she did not please, she intoxicated.

The first step in crafting the life you want is to get rid of everything you don't.

Learning isn't acquiring knowledge so much as it is trimming information that has already been acquired.

Cleverness isn't always true nor is the truth always clever.

That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. [BusinessWeek, May 25 1998]

One of the purest souls ever to live on this fallen planet was Nicholas Herman, known as Brother Lawrence. He wrote very little, but what he wrote has seemed to several generations of Christians to be so rare and so beautiful as to deserve a place near the top among the world's great books of devotion. The writings of Brother Lawrence are the ultimate in simplicity; ideas woven like costly threads to make a pattern of great beauty.

History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.