Simplicity Quotes - Page 30

• Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I've understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. The height of cultivation is really nothing special. It is merely simplicity; the ability to express the utmost with the minimum.

  Bruce Lee

  Art, Special, Height

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• Out of chaos, find simplicity, From discord, find harmony.

  Bruce Lee

  Chaos, Harmony, Discord

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• I really like Calvin Klein for his classic simplicity. I also think Prabal Gurung designs some great pieces that work well for me. My mom has such great style she's my biggest influence.

  Isabelle Fuhrman

  Mom, Thinking, Design

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• I love the simplicity, the ingredients, the culture, the history and the seasonality of Italian cuisine. In Italy people do not travel. They cook the way grandma did, using fresh ingredients and what is available in season.

  Anne Burrell

  Grandma, Italian, People

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• The refined simplicity should develop out of the complex. It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkie instead of the other way around.

  Mary Pickford

  Way, Silent, Logical

  "Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood". Book by Eileen Whitfield, 1997.

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• Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.

  Eric S. Raymond

  Smart, Data, Design

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.37, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only error to have ruined more designs than feature creep. From tortured code to incomprehensible data layouts, the results of obsessing about speed or memory or disk usage at the expense of transparency and simplicity are everywhere. They spawn innumerable bugs and cost millions of man-hours - often, just to get marginal gains in the use of some resource much less expensive than debugging time

  Eric S. Raymond

  Memories, Men, Errors

  Eric S. Raymond (2003). “The Art of UNIX Programming”, p.23, Addison-Wesley Professional

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• But I should not have to explain to you how important it is for science and simplicity to coexist. One must not fear to be a little child again, when times of wonder are at hand.

  Jody Lynn Nye

  Children, Hands, Important

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• Meditation could be said to be the Art of Simplicity: simply sitting, simply breathing and simply being.

  Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

  Art, Breathing, Meditation

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• The simple person lives the way he breathes, with no more effort or glory, with no more affectation and without shame Simplicity is freedom, buoyancy, transparency. As simple as the air, as free as the air The simple person does not take himself too seriously or too tragicallyHe has nothing to prove, since he has no appearances to keep up, and nothing to seek, since everything is before him. What is more simple than simplicity? What is lighter? It is the virtue of wise men and the wisdom of saints.

  Andre Comte-Sponville

  Wise, Simple, Men

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• Personally, I am always more impressed by simplicity, clarity; it is the mark of a writer who knows his subject well and is secure enough not to 'lay it on' in the telling. Aim for complexity of thought, not expression.

  Noah Lukeman

  Expression, Clarity, Enough

  Noah Lukeman (2010). “The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile”, p.36, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking, brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness.

  Gary Snyder

  Gratitude, Play, World

  Gary Snyder (2010). “The Practice of the Wild”, p.25, Counterpoint Press

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• We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Less Is More, Proportion, Can Do

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• For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Book, Mean, Expression

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• I once heard a woman who had lost her dog say that she felt as though a color were suddenly missing from her world: the dog had introduced to her field of vision some previously unavailable hue and without a dog, that color was gone. That seemed to capture the experience of loving a dog with eminent simplicity. I'd amend it only slightly and say that if we are open to what they have to give, dogs can introduce us to several colors with names like wildness, nurturance, trust and joy.

  Caroline Knapp

  Dog, Color, Names

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• Outward simplicity befits ordinary men, like a garment made to measure for them; but it serves as an adornment to those who have filled their lives with great deeds: they might be compared to some beauty carelessly dressed and thereby all the more attractive.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Beauty, Men, Deeds

  "Of Personal Merit", Aphorism 17, 1688.

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• We in the "developed" world seem to have many auditory strategies that insulate us from the presence of silence, simplicity, and solitude. When I return to Western culture after time in desert, mountain or forest, I discover how we have filled our world with a multiplicity of noises, a symphony of forgetfulness that keeps our won thoughts and realizations, feelings and intuitions out of audible range.

  Joan Halifax

  Our World, Symphony, Silence

  Joan Halifax (2007). “The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom”, p.38, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Why not simply honor your parents, love your children, help your brothers and sisters, be faithful to your friends, care for your mate with devotion, complete your work cooperatively and joyfully, assume responsibility for problems, practice virtue without first demanding it of others, understand the highest truths yet retain an ordinary manner? That would be true clarity, true simplicity, true mastery.

  Laozi

  Sister, Faith, Brother

  Laozi, Brian Browne Walker (1992). “Hua Hu Ching: Teachings of Lao Tzu”

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• Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train, people that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.

  Ben Okri

  Reading, Creativity, Character

  Ben Okri (2014). “A Way of Being Free”, p.24, Head of Zeus

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• Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

  Edward Abbey

  Flower, Space, Light

  Edward Abbey (1988). “Desert Solitaire”, p.26, University of Arizona Press

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• Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass.

  Edward Abbey

  Distance, Kids, Work Out

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.41, RosettaBooks

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• The future of computer power is pure simplicity.

  Douglas Adams

  Computer, Pure

  Douglas Adams (2005). “The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time”, p.84, Del Rey

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• A quote that I like very much comes close to explaining my attitude about taking photographs. ‘Chinese poetry rarely trespasses beyond the bounds of actuality the great Chinese poets accept the world exactly as they find it in all its terms and with profound simplicity they seldom talk about one thing in terms of another; but are able enough and sure enough as artists to make the ultimately exact terms become the beautiful terms.’

  Stephen Shore

  Beautiful, Attitude, Artist

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• Cultivate simplicity or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart.

  Charles Lamb

  Spring, Heart, Spontaneous

  Charles Lamb, Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd (1854). “Talfourd, T. N. Life and letters”, p.38

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• Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable. In terms of idea the artist is free to even surprise himself. Ideas are discovered by intuition.

  Sol LeWitt

  Successful, Artist, Simple

  Sol LeWitt (1995). “Sol Lewitt: critical texts”, Power House Books

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