“It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.”
Source: This Side of Paradise
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F. Scott Fitzgerald 411
American novelist and screenwriter 1896–1940Related quotes
“Death is simple. Life is messy. Give me life, the more complicated the better.”
“Life is too complicated to use analogies to describe it.”
Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)
“Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.”
Variant (perhaps a paraphrase of this passage): It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
Context: Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. We should never know how to adjust means to ends, or to employ our natural powers in the production of any effect. There would be an end at once of all action, as well as of the chief part of speculation.
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
Attributed on the internet but not found in print prior to an attribution in Aero Digest, Vols. 58–59, 1949, p. 115 https://books.google.com/books?id=q2ofAQAAMAAJ&dq=%22Life+is+simple%22+but+we+insist+on+making+it+complicated&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22Life+is+simple%22+
Misattributed, Not Chinese
“The Simple Life is the last refuge of complicated and restless souls.”
Source: A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906), Ch. I, p. 22
“The process of breaking the code was enormously complicated in real life.”
As quoted in "Interview: Morten Tyldum, Graham Moore of The Imitation Game" by PatrickMcD at Hollywood Chicago (11 December 2014)
Context: What is amazing about the story is that the most fantastic things that occur, that people most don't believe, are absolutely true — like the Soviet mole that they allowed to operate within British war intelligence — that was all true. … We condensed the timeline, essentially. The process of breaking the code was enormously complicated in real life. So one of things we wanted to do was open up Turing's story to the audience and make a film about these complicated topics, but at the same time create a narrative that the audience understands, without insulting their intelligence. But the on a broad conceptual level, everything is true.
Source: Gardens of the Moon (1999), Chapter 16 (p. 457)
“An icon of the struggle for life.”
Nelson Mandela
The Body: The Complete HIV/AIDS Resource http://www.thebody.com/content/news/art42594.html