“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”

— Henry David Thoreau

Variant: Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
Source: Walden and Other Writings

Last update March 7, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify." by Henry David Thoreau?

Henry David Thoreau 385

1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitio… 1817–1862

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 159

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

Source: The (Mis)Behavior of Markets (2004, 2008), Ch. 7, p. 125
Context: Contrary to popular opinion, mathematics is about simplifying life, not complicating it. A child learns a bag of candies can be shared fairly by counting them out: That is numeracy. She abstracts that notion to dividing a candy bar into equal pieces: arithmetic. Then, she learns how to calculate how much cocoa and sugar she will need to make enough chocolate for fifteen friends: algebra.

“Simplify your life. You don't grow spiritual, you shrink spiritual.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 16

“The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

Source: The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

“What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn't data have to be "boiled down" and "simplified"? These common questions miss the point, for the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading..”

Edward R. Tufte Envisioning Information

Source: Envisioning Information

“The duration of the life of men may be considerably increased. It would be true progress to go back to the simple dishes of our ancestors. … Progress would consist in simplifying many sides of the lives of civilised people.”

Élie Metchnikoff (1845–1916) Russian-French immunologist, embriologist, biologist, Nobel laureat

Quoted in Strength and Diet https://books.google.it/books?id=uexsAAAAMAAJ by Francis Albert Rollo Russell (London: Longmans, Green, & Co, 1905), p. 2.

“Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole — so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

On the Art of Fiction"; originally published in The Borzoi 1920 (1920)
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

“The easiest way to simplify society is to reduce it to a military organization. That is the most primitive form of social organization. And that is precisely what is being done. The unit of communal life shrinks. Wealth, prosperity, inventiveness, choice, demand are subordinated to simplified nationalistic aims. The very mind which created the liberal universe becomes atrophied through disuse.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
p. 72

“I came hither [Craigenputtoch] solely with the design to simplify my way of life and to secure the independence through which I could be enabled to remain true to myself.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

Letter to Goethe, (1828).
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

“You have been compelled to cultivate your reflective faculties for want of occasions for frittering away your life on silly trifles.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Source: Wuthering Heights

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Henry David Thoreau 385

Related quotes

Related topics