Simplicity Quotes - Page 39

• Ernest Bevin had many of the strongest characteristics of the English race. His manliness, his common sense, his rough simplicity, sturdiness and kind heart, easy geniality and generosity, all are qualities which we who live in the southern part of this famous island regard with admiration.

  Ernest Bevin

  Heart, Islands, Race

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• Three principles - the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the utility of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality - are thus consequences of the underlying law of the elementary particles and their interactions. Those three principles need not be assumed as separate metaphysical postulates. Instead, they are emergent properties of the fundamental laws of physics.

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Reality, Law, Effectiveness

  "Murray Gell-Mann: Selected Papers". Book by Murray Gell-Mann and Harald Fritzsch, 2010.

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• To be always ready a man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Cutting, Men, Simple Life

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• Elegant in its simplicity and practicality, Lee has distilled many powerful leadership strategies into the lessons many of us learned as children. They are no less relevant to our working lives. At its core, Creating Magic is a collection of stories that reminds us to demonstrate care and respect for every member of the team and to focus our efforts not our ourselves but on the people we lead.

  George Bodenheimer

  Children, Powerful, Team

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• Elegance of language must give way before simplicity in preaching sound doctrine.

  Girolamo Savonarola

  Giving, Way, Sound Doctrine

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 481, 1895.

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• I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together.

  Anita Brookner

  Lonely, Passion, Animal

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• Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action.

  Richard Russo

  Believe, Past, Thinking

  "Straight Man". Book by Richard Russo, 1997.

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• To be at one with God is to be at peace. The child simplicity is the greatest agency in bringing this full and complete realization, the child simplicity that recognizes its true relations with the Father's life. There are people I know who have come into such a conscious realization of their oneness with this Infinite Life, this Spirit of Infinite Peace, that their lives are fairly bubbling over with joy.

  Ralph Waldo Trine

  Children, Father, Oneness

  Ralph Waldo Trine (2013). “In Tune with the Infinite”, p.75, Simon and Schuster

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• To be friends with God means to pray with simplicity, like children talking to their parents.

  Pope Francis

  Children, Mean, Servant Of God

  Pope Francis (2015). “The Spirit of St Francis: Inspiring Words on Faith, Love and Creation”, p.60, SPCK

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• You all know the saying which is very true: What you resist persists. And I'm sure many of you have already found that out in your life. And then suddenly when you let go of resistance you let go of an attachment to something: I need this to happen in order to be happy; I don't want what is, I want something else. To be okay with what is, which is the simplicity of this moment, is the beginning of true change.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Letting Go, Attachment, Order

  FaceBook post by Eckhart Tolle from Feb 29, 2012

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• We favor hypotheses for their simplicity and explanatory power, much as the architect of the world might have done in choosing which possibility to create.

  Ian Hacking

  Done, World, Favors

  Ian Hacking (1984). “The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference”, p.142, Cambridge University Press

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• Simplicity is not so simple to attain.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Simple

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012). “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder”, p.11, Random House

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• A hypothetical theory is necessary, as a preliminary step, to reduce the expression of the phenomena to simplicity and order before it is possible to make any progress in framing an abstractive theory.

  William John Macquorn Rankine

  Expression, Order, Progress

  William John Macquorn Rankine, Peter Guthrie Tait (1881). “Miscellaneous Scientific Papers”

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• Simplicity, without variety, is wholly insipid.

  William Hogarth

  Insipid, Variety

  1753 The Analysis of Beauty

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• It would be a sign of great simplicity to think that the world was created in six days, or indeed at all in time; [...] Time is a thing posterior to the world. Therefore it would be correctly said that the world was not created in time, but that time had its existence in consequence of the world. For it is the motion of the heaven that has displayed the nature of time.

  Philo

  Thinking, Heaven, Would Be

  "Allegories of the Sacred Laws". Book I, §2. Translated by C. D. Yonge in "The works of Philo Judaeus", Vol. 1, pp. 52 - 53, 1854.

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• All the simplicity in the world can do no good, unless you preach the simple gospel of Jesus Christ so fully and clearly that everybody can understand it. If 'Christ crucified' has not His rightful place in your sermons, and sin is not exposed as it should be, and your people are not plainly told what they ought to believe, and be, and do - your preaching is of no use!

  J. C. Ryle

  Jesus, Believe, Simple

  J.C. Ryle (2015). “The Upper Room: Biblical Truths For Modern Times”, p.33, Whitaker House

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• Like music or art, mathematical equations can have a natural progression and logic that can evoke rare passions in a scientist. Although the lay public considers mathematical equations to be rather opaque, to a scientist an equation is very much like a movement in a larger symphony. Simplicity. Elegance. These are the qualities that have inspired some of the greatest artists to create their masterpieces, and they are precisely the same qualities that motivate scientists to search for the laws of nature. LIke a work of art or a haunting poem, equations have a beauty and rhythm all their own.

  Michio Kaku

  Art, Passion, Mathematical Equations

  Michio Kaku (1995). “Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension”, p.130, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Ancient simplicity is gone...the people of today are satisfied with nothing but finery.

  Ihara Saikaku

  People, Gone, Today

  "The Japanese Family Storehouse" by Ihara Saikaku, (Book I, ch. 4), 1688.

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• Greek culture is pleasant to contemplate because of its great simplicity and naturalness, and because of the absence of gadgets, each of which is sooner or later a cause of servitude.

  George Sarton

  Greek, Culture, Gadgets

  George Sarton (1952). “Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece”, p.10, Courier Corporation

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• When will you disembarrass yourselves of the lymphatic ideology of that deplorable Ruskin, which I would like to cover with so much ridicule that you would never forget it? With his morbid dream of primitive and rustic life, with his nostalgia for Homeric cheeses and legendary wool-spinners, with his hatred for the machine, steam power, and electricity, that maniac of antique simplicity is like a man who, after having reached full physical maturity, still wants to sleep in his cradle and feed himself at the breast of his decrepit old nurse in order to recover his thoughtless infancy.

  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

  Dream, Sleep, Men

  "Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America" by Anthony L. Geist, Jose B. Monle-N, Taylor & Francis, (p. 57), 1999.

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• The art of British Columbia's native Indians played a big role in inspiring my creativity... the simplicity of the images, the graciousness of the lines and curves, and the emotional impact of the bright simple primary colours.

  Joe Average

  Art, Creativity, Simple

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• Nature with her wealth of birds and flowers, Has in her heart a place for every weed; For her quick eyes require no microscope To note the varied wonders and delights That the Creator's humblest works possess.

  Kobo Abe

  Weed, Nature, Flower

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• You have to be careful when you use beauty as a guide. There are many theories people didn't think were beautiful at the time but did find beautiful later—and vice versa. I think simplicity is a good guide: The more economical a theory, the better.

  Lisa Randall

  Beautiful, Thinking, People

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• What were once felt to be defects-isolation, institutional simplicity, primitiveness of manners, multiplicity of religions, weaknesses in the authority of the state-could now be seen as virtues, not only by Americans themselves but by enlightened spokesmen of reform, renewal and hope wherever they may be-in London coffeehouses, in Parisian salons, in the courts of German princes.

  Bernard Bailyn

  Weakness, Reform, May

  Bernard Bailyn (1992). “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution”, p.160, Harvard University Press

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• If you'd spent your life being called "Gyles Brandreth", you would crawl across broken glass to achieve the bliss, the simplicity, the purity, the joy of simply being called "Bob".

  Gyles Brandreth

  Glasses, Broken, Joy

  "Genius" with Dave Gorman, BBC Radio 4, Series 3, Episode 4, October 22, 2007.

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