Quotes about simple
page 19

“I thought, well. when I step off it's just going to be a little step — a step from there down to there — but then I thought about all those 400,000 people who had given me the opportunity to make that step and thought it's going to be a big something for all those folks and, indeed for a lot of others that weren't even involved in the project, so it was kind of a simple correlation.”

Neil Armstrong (1930–2012) American astronaut; first person to walk on the moon

On what inspired him to say his famous words, "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."
60 Minutes interview (2005)

People

“Since the Gothic, European sculpture had become overgrown with moss, weeds – all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi's special mission to get rid of this overgrowth, and make us once more shape-conscious. To do this he has had to concentrate on very simple direct shapes, to keep his sculpture, as it were, one-cylindered, to refine and polish a single shape to a degree almost too precious.... it may now be no longer necessary to close down and restrict sculpture to the single form unit. We can now begin to open out. To relate and combine together several forms of varied sizes, sections, and directions into one organic whole.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Source: 1925 - 1940, The sculptor speaks' (1937), p. 250

“The great gift of the southern lands to our civilisation is the simple right to sit at an outside cafe table and look at things.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

“I am Ra. Consider, if you will, a simple example of intentions which are bad/good. This example is Adolf. This is your vibratory sound complex. The intention is to presumably unify by choosing the distortion complex called elite from a social memory complex and then enslaving, by various effects, those who are seen as the distortion of not-elite. There is then the concept of taking the social memory complex thus weeded and adding it to a distortion thought of by the so-called Orion group as an empire. The problem facing them is that they face a great deal of random energy released by the concept of separation. This causes them to be vulnerable as the distortions amongst their own members are not harmonized.”

Carla Rueckert

Session 7 http://www.lawofone.info/results.php?s=7#14 Quotations as Ra

Problem, Memory

“All of our conscious states, without exception, are caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are realized in the brain as higher level, or system features. It's about as mysterious as the liquidity of water, right? The liquidity is not an extra juice squirted out by the H2O molecules, it's a condition that the system is in; and just as the jar full of water can go from a liquid to solid, depending on the behavior of the molecules, so your brain can go from a state of being conscious to a state of being unconscious, depending on the behavior of the molecules. The famous mind body problem is that simple.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

"Our shared condition — consciousness" (May, 2013)

Behavior, Problem, Water, Dependency

“Just as towers and crenellations indicated a building’s status, so the crenellated wall signified a castle in the visual arts and in that distinctive medieval sign language known as heraldry. The heraldic symbol of the kingdom of Castile, for example, consisted of a wall and three crenellated towers. This simple composition was easily recognized and reproduced.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Source: Medieval castles (2005), Ch. 4 : The Castle as Symbol and Palace

Art

“No one, who knows what the difficulties are, now believes that the crisis of physics is likely to be resolved by any simple trick or modification of existing theories. Something radical is needed, and it will have to go far wider than physics. A new world outlook is being forged, but much experiment and argument will be needed before it can take a definitive form. It must be coherent, it must include and illuminate the new knowledge of fundamental particles and their complex fields, it must resolve the paradoxes of wave and particle, it must make the world inside the atom and the wide spaces of the universe equally intelligible. It must have a different dimension from all previous world views, and include in itself an explanation of development and the origin of new things. In this it will fall naturally in line with the converging tendencies of the biological and social sciences in which a regular pattern blends with their evolutionary history.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

J.D. Bernal (1959/1969) Science in history Vol 3. p. 862; cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) General System Theory. p. 5-6

World, History, Intelligence, Nature

“Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not.”

Edward Teller (1908–2003) Hungarian-American nuclear physicist

Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics (1991) by Edward Teller, Wendy Teller and Wilson Talley, Ch. 10, p. 150 footnote

“In simple terms: art has not been a public nuisance for quite a while now. either the people have become well-behaved or the perpetrators of nuisances have become tired.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 208 (2003)

People, Art

“A proper anti-swamp agenda should consist of two things. First, and most fundamentally, it should seek to reduce the size of the federal government, and cut regulations and make them as simple as possible. The more government does, the more incentive every special interest has to hire swamp creatures, for both protection and advantage. And the more complex government is, the more opportunity those creatures have to thrive in niches unknown or poorly understood by everyone except insiders. Second, and more specifically, the federal government should be wrenched out of its cozy relationship with large, established businesses and institutions in areas ranging from health care to finance to education.”

Rich Lowry (1968) American journalist

No, the Swamp Won't Be Drained (December 01, 2016)

Health, Education, Business

“I believe you are more believing in the Bible than I. I am not, and, you are much happier than I. I must say that so often in earlier times when I saw people of the lower classes, simple manual laborers who could believe so rightly with their hearts, I always envied them, and now tell me how does one begin this?”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

A reply to Rudolf Wagner's on his religious views as quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 305.

People, Time, Heart, Envy

“And as every present state of a simple substance is naturally a consequence of its preceding state, so its present is pregnant with its future.”

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) German mathematician and philosopher

Et comme tout présent état d'une substance simple est naturellement une suite de son état précédent, tellement, que le présent y est gros de l'avenir.
La monadologie (22).
The Monadology (1714)

Nature, Future

“He linked the notion of a spontaneous order that forms when agents follow (often simple) rules with the idea of complex systems in the 1950s. This was a critical breakthrough, for it allowed him to drop the old natural science-social science dichotomy …”

Bruce Caldwell (economist) (1952) economic historian

Source: Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (2004), Ch. 14 : Journey’s End—Hayek’s Multiple Legacies

Idea, Nature, Science

“When looking at the two streams of research these men produced, it is tempting to characterize Buchanan as a somewhat romantic optimist holding the belief that the pursuits of selfish individuals can be channeled for the common good, if the right set of constitutional constraints are adopted, and believing that individuals are capable of designing constitutions that achieve this goal. Thus, some 35 years after the publication of The Calculus, we find Buchanan, in joint work with Roger Congleton (1998), accepting the fact that legislatures always will adopt the simple majority rule, and trying to design constitutional constraints that will lead to outcomes benefiting all members of the community under that rule.”

Dennis Mueller (1940) American economist

James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and The Calculus (2012)

Men, Communication, Selfishness

“The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind… To put the conclusion crudely — the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by "mind" I do not exactly mean mind and by "stuff" I do not at all mean stuff. Still that is about as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase. The mind-stuff of the world is something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to feelings in our consciousness… Having granted this, the mental activity of the part of world constituting ourselves occasions no great surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge, and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be — or rather, it knows itself to be.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Source: The Nature of the Physical World (1928), Ch. 13 Reality

World, Way, Feeling, Idea

“Let it not be in any man's power to say truly of thee that thou art not simple or that thou art not good; but let him be a liar whoever shall think anything of this kind about thee; and this is altogether in thy power.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

X, 32
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X

Art, Thinking

“Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round inferior race. Is that any reason why we should propose to preserve it for ever…? Whether there is a race so inferior I do not know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to be trusted with human charges. The true answer to Aristotle’s plea for slavery, that there are “natural slaves,” lies in the fact that there are no “natural” masters… The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior. There is only one sane and logical thing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is to exterminate it. Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them are cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can maintain such conditions as conduce to “race suicide,” as the British administration does in Fiji. Suppose, then, for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race… If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would survive—they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind. Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world? Even the Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming Australian white may think. These queer little races, the black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that, a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation. We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in Utopia, and so all the surviving “black-fellows” are there. Every one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, a fair education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity…Some may be even prosperous and admired, may have married women of their own or some other race, and so may be transmitting that distinctive thin thread of excellence, to take its due place in the great synthesis of the future.”

H. G. Wells book A Modern Utopia

Source: A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 10, sect. 3

Death, Women, World, Education

“Now it is one great object of this work, to shew the importance and advantage of ascertaining the relative weights of the ultimate particles, both of simple and compound bodies, the number of simple elementary particles which constitute one compound particle, and the number of less compound particles which enter into the formation of one more compound particle.”

John Dalton book A New System of Chemical Philosophy

Source: A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808), Ch. III. On Chemical Synthesis

“To speak the unspeakable without the proper rhetorical flourish or introduction; to muff that flourish, either by accident, misjudgment, or simple ignorance; to choose the wrong flourish or not choose any (i. e., to choose the flourish called "the literal") is to perform the unspeakable.”

Samuel R. Delany (1942) American author, professor and literary critic

On the Unspeakable, Avant-Pop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avant-Pop:_Fiction_for_a_Daydream_Nation, p. 150

“The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and simply asserts being, "I am", already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates' attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy. Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: "I am". This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Ps 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act "with logos" is contrary to God's nature.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2006, Faith, Reason and the University — Memories and Reflections (2006)

Wisdom, God, Faith, Religion

“Truth is contrary to our nature, not so error, and this for a very simple reason; truth demands that we should recognize ourselves as limited, error flatters us that, in one way or another, we are unlimited.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Die Wahrheit widerspricht unserer Natur, der Irrthum nicht, und zwar aus einem sehr einfachen Grunde: die Wahrheit fordert, daß wir uns für beschränkt erkennen follen, der Irrthum schmeichelt uns. wir seien auf ein- oder die andere Weise unbegränzt.
Maxim 310, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Truth, Way, Error, Nature

“What the hell is Dianetics and Scientology? It’s a religion. A religion of self. It’s one man’s religion. One man’s labyrinth. A trip of L. Ron Hubbard’s. A trip he lays on everyone else as ‘the trip,’ their trip, your trip. A science fiction story he wrote and forced into reality within the heads of others by the will of L. Ron Hubbard. The self-created fantasy of one man brought to deadly reality for others by a simple word: agreement.”

Ronald DeWolf (1934–1991) American critic of Scientology

The Telling of Me, by Me (1981)

Religion, Hell, Reality, Science

“My parents seem to me possessed of great dignity. An aristocratic reserve. Like the very rich who live behind tall walls, my mother and father are always mindful of the line separating public from private life. Watching a celebrity talk show on television, they listen for several minutes as a movie star with bright teeth recounts details of his recent divorce. And I see my parents grow impatient. Finally, my mother gets up from her chair. Changing the channel, she says with simple disdain, ‘Cheap people.’ My mother and my father are not cheap people. They never are tempted to believe that public life can also be intimate. And I realize that my parents will be as puzzled by my act of self-revelation as they are by the movie star’s revelations on the talk show. They never will call me cheap for publishing an autobiography. But I can well imagine their faces tightened by incomprehension as they read my words.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Why does he do this?
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Life, People, Imagination, Star

“From the poet's viewpoint a lyric is a poem which embodies a single or simple emotional attitude that expresses directly an uninterrupted mood or inspiration.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

Form in Modern Poetry(1932)

Mood

“While there are scores of other lessons to glean from Noah’s life, let’s just look at one more here. It is the simple lesson “Don’t Listen to Critics,” if you know you are doing what God wants. Satan seems to always send opposition to anyone who seeks to do something for God. I’m sure Noah had his critics, but he didn’t stop building! BTW-- Can you name ANY of Noah's neighbors? Hmmm?”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 62

Life, God

“In the application of the ordinary principles of geometry and trigonometry to such Astronomical measures… it may sometimes be expedient to resolve the process into several successive steps, and these steps may perhaps require different kinds of treatment. But… all are simple and within ordinary comprehension, and the only complexity arises from the circumstance that the student may find it necessary to have a clear view of several such steps at once…”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Introduction
Popular Astronomy: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Ipswich (1868)

Success

“Listen to what the heart has to say. It is not going to run your life. The heart's message is so simple. It's not going to tell you that you should buy this color jacket, and this color car and this color house. Heart only has one thing to say to you, 'Be fulfilled.' This is all it ever has wanted, and this is the only demand the heart has for you. What have we done with ourselves? We have made ourselves slaves of the past and the future. Take away the future, which doesn't yet exist, and the past that has disappeared. Be fulfilled now, in this moment.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Paris, France July 7, 1990
1990s

Life, Cars, Color, Past

“The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.”

Hannah Arendt book On Violence

"On Violence".
Crises of the Republic (1969)

Death, Secret, Appearance

“The media challenged me. `You're not going to bring atheists into the government? How dare you maintain that those who believe the Judeo-Christian values are better qualified to govern America than Hindus and Muslims?' My simple answer is, `Yes, they are.”

Pat Robertson (1930) American media mogul, executive chairman, and a former Southern Baptist minister

http://www.sullivan-county.com/news/pat_quotes/hindus.htm

“I don't think movie stars are nationally relevant – it's as simple as that.”

Shahrukh Khan (1965) Indian actor, producer and television personality

From interview with Anshul Chaturvedi

Star, Thinking

“The secret to perseverance is a simple one: have a bigger commitment to getting the job done than to attempting to control your inner feelings and sensations.”

Nicholas Lore (1944) American social scientist

The Pathfinder (1998)

Secret, Feeling, Perseverance

“genuine continence and virginity are rare and costly achievements - admirable and really extraordinary; the real thing, nota bene, not simply a shrivelling of Eros-power by means of life-long taboo injections. The Ancients knew this - they called chastity, honestly, simply and humbly, a gift, a charisma, to be implored from God with tears and in humiliating experience - not just a simple athletic feat of will-power and self-control.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights p. 21 Diaries 1951.

Life, God, Tear

“A man's right to speak does not depend upon where he was born or upon his color. The simple quality of manhood is the solid basis of the right - and there let it rest forever.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1880s, Plea for Free Speech in Boston (1880)

Color, Dependency

“A number of statistical assumptions are made in the application of his (Thurstone's) attitude scale e. g. that the scale values of the statements are independent of the attitude distribution of the readers who sort the statements assumptions which as Thurstone points out, cannot always be verified. The method is more over laborious. It seems legitimate to Enquirer whether it actually does its work better than the simple scales which may be employed and the same breath to ask also whether it is not possible to construct equally reliable scales without making unnecessary statistical assumptions.”

Rensis Likert (1903–1981) American statistician

Likert, Rensis. "A technique for the measurement of attitudes." Archives of psychology (1932). p. 7

“As information systems play a more active role in the management and operations of an enterprise, the demands on these systems have also increased. Departing from their traditional role as simple repositories of data, information systems must now provide more sophisticated support to manual and automated decision making; they must not only answer queries with what is explicitly represented in their Enterprise Model, but must be able to answer queries with what is implied by the model. The goal of the TOVE Enterprise Modelling project is to create the next generation Enterprise Model, a Common Sense Enterprise Model. By common sense we mean that an Enterprise Model has the ability to deduce answers to queries that require relatively shallow knowledge of the domain.”

Mark S. Fox (1952) Canadian computer scientist and Professor of Industrial Engineering

Source: Methodology for the Design and Evaluation of Ontologies (1995), p. 1: Introduction

Support, Knowledge, Decision, Sense

“You're not bloody Aristophanes, and the people who are paying for tickets are not educated Athenians. We're acting for turnips who only come to talk to their cousins and fart. We have to give them a lot of action and low-level jokes, but you can leave all that to us on stage. We know what's required. Your job is to hone the basic framework and remember the simple motto: short speeches, short lines, short words.”

Lindsey Davis book Last Act in Palmyra

Last Act in Palmyra

People, Education

“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions remov’d by death, and cou’d I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I shou’d be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If any one upon serious and unprejudic’d reflexion, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu’d, which he calls himself; tho’ I am certain there is no such principle in me… But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 4, Section 6
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 1: Of the understanding

Love, Death, Pain, Hate

“There can be no such thing as a simple "women's issue" in a capitalist system founded on the enslavement of Africans, in which racism remains embedded in its foundation and all its institutions. Nearly every so-called "women's" issue has a racial component.”

Sharon Smith (writer) (1956) American historian

A Marxist Case For Intersectionality (2017)

Women

“The more complex our economy, the more we should rely on the miraculous, self-adapting processes of men acting freely. No mind of man nor any combination of minds can even envision, let alone intelligently control, the countless human energy exchanges in a simple society, to say nothing of a complex one.”

Leonard E. Read (1898–1983) American academic

The More Complex the Society, the More Government Control We Need https://books.google.com/books?id=W3MuCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT18&lpg=PT18&dq=The+more+complex+our+economy,+the+more+we+should+rely+on+the+miraculous,+self-adapting+processes+of+men+acting+freely.+No+mind+of+man+nor+any+combination+of+minds+can+even+envision,+let+alone+intelligently+control,+the+countless+human+energy+exchanges+in+a+simple+society,+to+say+nothing+of+a+complex+one.&source=bl&ots=OZxiANz5bm&sig=QP-xiNhoDNxDDMB1mcR25NuqEl4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiq04eE9_LTAhVMKyYKHWh_BGEQ6AEIKjAB#v=onepage&q=The%20more%20complex%20our%20economy%2C%20the%20more%20we%20should%20rely%20on%20the%20miraculous%2C%20self-adapting%20processes%20of%20men%20acting%20freely.%20No%20mind%20of%20man%20nor%20any%20combination%20of%20minds%20can%20even%20envision%2C%20let%20alone%20intelligently%20control%2C%20the%20countless%20human%20energy%20exchanges%20in%20a%20simple%20society%2C%20to%20say%20nothing%20of%20a%20complex%20one.&f=false Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism

Men, Intelligence

“You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.'
'What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?'
'Write how you are but make it straight.”

Ernest Hemingway book Islands in the Stream

Pt. 1: Bimini, Section 10
Islands in the Stream (1970)

Way, Thinking

“"It cannot be said that we are lacking in faith. Even the simple fact of our life is of a faith-value that can never be exhausted.” “You suggest there is some faith-value in this? One cannot not-live, after all.” “It is precisely in this ‘Cannot, after all’ that the mad strength of faith lies; it is in this negation that it takes on form.”
There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

109
Variant translations:
It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)

Life, World, Faith, Waiting

“They contain, by the side of simple, natural, childish thoughts, many ideas which to us sound decidedly modern, or secondary and tertiary.”

Max Müller (1823–1900) German-born philologist and orientalist

On the Vedas, in India, What can it teach us (1882) Lecture IV

Idea, Nature

“To win, beloved Caroline from thee,
One thought, in years when we shall sever'd be--
--Sever'd, perchance, by those deep waves, which pour
Their billowy murmurs round our native shore,--
For this, I wander'd round the Bow'rs of Song,
A weary, and rejected suppliant long,
And of the Muses crav'd in humblest tone
From their rich wreaths, one simple bud alone:
They did but fling their wildest weeds at me,
And thus I twin'd them into verse for thee!”

Eliza Acton (1799–1859) Poet, cook

To Caroline (1826)

“The preference for [the term] 'queer' represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalizations; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal. … For both academics and activists, 'queer' gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual. … The insistence on 'queer' … has the effect of pointing out a wide field of normalization, rather than simple intolerance, as the site of violence.”

Michael Warner (1958) American writer

Warner, Michael (1993). "Introduction", Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, p. xxvi. Ed. Michael Warner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

“And here and there a human who saw the rightness of the proposition that Man could not, by mere self-assertion, be a special being; understanding that it was to his greater glory to take his place among the other things of life, as a simple thing of life, as a form of life that could lead and teach and be a friend rather than a thing that conquered and ruled and stood as one apart.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XXXIX (p. 195)

Life, Understanding

“In the cold light of the morning they almost bore a grudge against the girl for not having secretly sought out the Prussian, that the rest of the party might receive a joyful surprise when they awoke. What more simple?
Besides, who would have been the wiser? She might have saved appearances by telling the officer that she had taken pity on their distress. Such a step would be of so little consequence to her.
But no one as yet confessed to such thoughts.”

Guy De Maupassant book Boule de Suif

Boule de Suif (1880)

Girl, Light, Appearance

“Look at the design of a lot of consumer products — they're really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

On the design of the iPod, as quoted in Newsweek (14 October 2006)
2000s

People, Problem, Time

“The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. 1: The Naked and the Nude

Art, Parting

“In truth, I am more than content with my current life. I have only ever dreamed of a simple, honorable, happy, and peaceful life for myself and my beloved family.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2015, Speech: Declaration as Vice Presidential Candidate

Life, Happiness, Truth, Family

“The theory of the tides has been reduced into an extremely simple form, which appears to agree better with all the phenomena, than the more intricate calculations which they have commonly been supposed to require.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Preface
A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807)

Appearance

“On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting;
'Twas only that when he was off he was acting.”

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) Irish physician and writer

Source: Retaliation (1774), Line 101.

Nature

“Bill, why is it that some apparently-grown men never learn to do simple arithmetic?”

Robert A. Heinlein book Farmer in the Sky

Source: Farmer in the Sky (1950), Chapter 14, “Land of My Own” (p. 142)

Men, Learning

“I shook my head ruefully. Police departments all over the world were identical in two respects: they all have a fondness for breaking your head open for little or no provocation, and they can’t see the simple truth if it’s lying in front of them naked with its legs spread. The police don’t enforce laws; they don’t even get busy until after the laws are broken. They solve crimes at a pitifully low rate of success. What the police are, to be honest, is a kind of secretarial pool that records the names of the victims and the statements of the witnesses. After enough time passes, they can safely shove this information to the back of the filing system to make room for more.”

George Alec Effinger book When Gravity Fails

Source: When Gravity Fails (1986), Chapter 17 (pp. 235-236).

Truth, World, Law, Lying

“That is the greatest thing about him. That he is not only our leader and a great hero. But himself, upright, firm and simple. In him the roots of our world. And his soul touches the stars. And yet he remains a man like you and me.”

Baldur von Schirach (1907–1974) German Nazi leader convicted of crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg trial

A poem written by Schirach about Hitler in 1936. Quoted in "The Trial of the Germans" - Page 287 - by Eugene Davidson - History - 1997

World, Soul, Star

“Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Acis, in Pt. V
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

Love, Life, Art

“Creation exists for its Creator. Years of anthropocentrism have almost completely obscured this simple but fundamental point. What follows from this is that animals should not be seen simply as means to human ends. The key to grasping this theology is the abandoning of the common but deeply erroneous view that animals exist in a wholly instrumental relationship to human beings.”

Andrew Linzey (1952) British theologian and divine

Source: Animal Theology (1994), p. 24

Animals

“Hobbes’s understanding of the dangers of anarchy resonates powerfully today. Liberal thinkers still see the unchecked power of the state as the chief danger to human freedom. Hobbes knew better: freedom’s worst enemy is anarchy, which is at its most destructive when it is a battleground of rival faiths. The sectarian death squads roaming Baghdad show that fundamentalism is itself a type of anarchy in which each prophet claims divine authority to rule. In well-governed societies, the power of faith is curbed. The state and the churches temper the claims of revelation and enforce peace. Where this kind is impossible, tyranny is better than being ruled by warring prophets. Hobbes is a more reliable guide to the present than the liberal thinkers who followed. Yet his view of human beings was too simple, and overly rationalistic. Assuming that humans dread violent death more than anything, he left out the most intractable sources of conflict. It is not always because human beings act irrationally that they fail to achieve peace. Sometimes it is because they do not want peace. They may want the victory of the One True Faith – whether a traditional religion or a secular successor such as communism, democracy or universal human rights. Or – like the young people who joined far-Left terrorist groups in the 1970s, another generation of which is now joining Islamist networks – they may find in war a purpose that is lacking in peace. Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life.”

John Gray book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

Post-Apocalypse: After Secularism (pp. 262-3)
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007)

Life, Death, War, People

“Why are you so concerned about society?' That is always the question. And my answer is simple: 'Because you are an artist, you have to associate yourself with freedom of expression.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Truth to Power, 2009

Question, Freedom

“Certainly this man, such as I have described him, this loner who is gifted with an active imagination, traversing forever the vast desert of men, has a loftier aim than that of a simple idler, an aim more general than the passing pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for what one might be allowed to call modernity; for no better word presents itself to express the idea in question. What concerns him is to release the poetry of fashion from its historical trappings, to draw the eternal out of the transient.”

Charles Baudelaire Le Peintre de la vie moderne

A coup sûr, cet homme, tel que je l'ai dépeint, ce solitaire doué d'une imagination active, toujours voyageant à travers le grand désert d'hommes, a un but plus élevé que celui d'un pur flâneur, un but plus général, autre que le plaisir fugitif de la circonstance. Il cherche ce quelque chose qu'on nous permettra d'appeler la modernité; car il ne se présente pas de meilleur mot pour exprimer l'idée en question. Il s'agit, pour lui, de dégager de la mode ce qu'elle peut contenir de poétique dans l'historique, de tirer l'éternel du transitoire. IV: "La modernité" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Modernit%C3%A9 Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863)

Men, Pleasure, Imagination, Idea

“Considering how few, and how simple the Principles are, upon which the whole Art of Perspective depends, and withal how useful, nay how absolutely necessary this Art is to all forts of Designing; I have often wonder'd, that it has still been left in so low a degree of Perfection, as it is found to be, in the Books that have been hitherto wrote upon it.”

Brook Taylor (1685–1731) English mathematician

New Principles of Linear Perspective (1715, 1749)

Books, Art, Dependency, Perfection

“Where do you think I was today? I stood straight in front of him (Himmler) for a whole hour and talked, and he… he played with a puzzle the whole time – you know, this glass cube with three balls on the inside… When I finished, he took off his pince-nez, wiped it with a handkerchief – he has a skull even on his handkerchief – and said, "Listen, Ernst! Have you by any chance, ever had a dream, where you're riding in the back of a ragged truck to who knows where, and some monsters are sitting around you?" I didn’t say anything. Then he smiled and said, "Ernst, you know, I know as well as you that no astral exists. But what do you think, if you, and even Canaris, have your own people in 'Annenerbe', shouldn’t I have my own people there as well?" I did not understand what he meant. "Think Ernst, think!" he said. I kept silent. Then he smiled and asked, "Whose man do you think is Kröger?" …Yes, Emma… It seems I'm too simple for all these intrigues… But I know that while the Führer needs me, my heart will keep beating… You know, Emma… Sometimes it seems to me, that it's not me who is alive, but it's the Führer who is living inside me…”

Ernst Kaltenbrunner (1903–1946) Austrian-born senior official of Nazi Germany executed for war crimes

To Emma, recorded by secret spy listening device WS-M/13 located in Kaltenbrunner's bedroom, 1/14/1935. Quoted in "Kröger's Revelation" - by Viktor Pelevin - 1991 - Page 277

People, Smile, Dreams, Understanding

“Auto-suggestion is disconcerting in its simplicity. To the uninitiated, auto-suggestion or self-mastery is likely to appear disconcerting in its simplicity. But does not every discovery, every invention, seem simple and ordinary once it has become vulgarized and the details or mechanism of it known to the man in the street? Not that I am claiming autosuggestion as my discovery. Far from it, auto-suggestion is as old as the hills; only we had forgotten to practice it, and so we needed to learn it all over again.”

Emile Coué (1857–1926) French psychologist and pharmacist

Source: Autosuggestion : My method (2014), Chapter I. The reality of auto-suggestion.

Learning, Appearance

“I like communicating. I think it’s as simple as that. I get really lonely and dark if I can’t communicate with people.”

Shirley Manson (1966) Scottish singer and artist

Shirley Manson, No Tofu Magazine, Kelly O'Rourke, 2014, 30 January 2015 http://www.notofu.com/site/?portfolio=shirley-manson,

People, Communication, Thinking

“A great part of its theories derives an additional charm from the peculiarity that important propositions, with the impress of simplicity on them, are often easily discovered by induction, and yet are of so profound a character that we cannot find the demonstrations till after many vain attempts; and even then, when we do succeed, it is often by some tedious and artificial process, while the simple methods may long remain concealed.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

On higher arithmetic. Mathematical Circles Adieu (1977) by Howard W. Eves

Parting

“A few family friends complimented my appearance, and that made me feel a bit better about myself. It is so peculiar how a simple smile or a compliment can completely change how I feel about the world for a few moments.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), Thoughts at 19, Compliments

World, Family, Smile, Feeling

“When nobody in the world loves any other, naturally the strong will overpower the weak, the many will oppress the few, the wealthy will mock the poor, the honoured will disdain the humble, the cunning will deceive the simple. Therefore all the calamities, strifes, complaints, and hatred in the world have arisen out of want of mutual love. Therefore the benevolent disapproved of this want.”

Mozi (-470–-391 BC) Chinese political philosopher and religious reformer of the Warring States period

Book 4; Universal Love II
Mozi

Love, World, Nature, Strong

“C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Message to gmane.comp.version-control.git mailing list, 2007-09-07, Torvalds, Linus, 2007-09-22 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643, 2000s, 2007

Guy, Help

“Pretty simple. Except for one little problem: it doesn't work!”

Paul DiLascia (1959–2008) American software developer

various
About Code

Problem

“But we all do sort of the same thing and that is rearrange what you thought was real, and, uh, they remind you of the beauty of very simple things. You forget, because you're so busy going from A to Z, that there's, uh, 24 letters in between.”

Grace Slick (1939) American musician, writer and painter

Interview on the History Channel documentary Getting High - The History of LSD, 2001; sampled on Drop Out by Infected Mushroom

Beauty, Business, Forgetting

“Notices for Vigil meetings were always posted on the main bulletin board in the first-floor corridor, directly across from the Headmaster's office. Archie was entertained by the location of the notice right under Leon's nose. The notice was simple, involving the words TRINTY HIGH SCHOOL at the top of the board. On the day of the meeting, the Y of Trinity was inverted. Which made it look, as Archie said, like an upright finger. Thus, the Vigils giving the finger to the world while calling a meeting. That's what the upside-down Y was called: the Finger.”

Robert Cormier book Beyond the Chocolate War

Source: Beyond the Chocolate War (1985), p. 96

World, School

“Give me a mystery – just a plain and simple one – a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little, barefoot mystery: give me a mystery – just one!”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932–2017) Russian poet, film director, teacher

"Mysteries" (1960), st. 10; Dimitri Obolensky (ed.) The Heritage of Russian Verse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976) p. 452.

Silence

“For ne'er
Was flattery lost on poet's ear:
A simple race! they waste their toil
For the vain tribute of a smile.”

Walter Scott The Lay of the Last Minstrel

Canto IV, conclusion
The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805)

Smile

“Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple, that complexity reigns and must be accepted.”

Marina Warner (1946) writer and mythographer

Joan of Arc (Harmondsworth, Penguin, [1981] 1983) p. 263.

Understanding, Heart

“A Venezuelan dictator once decided to stop leprosy. He saw that most lepers in his country were also beggars. By the simple expedient of collecting and destroying all the beggars in Venezuela an end was put to leprosy in that country.”

L. Ron Hubbard book Science of Survival

Source: Science of Survival (1951), p. 171

Country

“Make me like a little child,
Simple, teachable, and mild;
Seeing only in Thy light;
Walking only in Thy might!”

John Berridge (1716–1793) British priest

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 334.

Light

“Seeing our common-sense conceptual framework for mental phenomena as a theory brings a simple and unifying organization to most of the major topics in the philosophy of mind.”

Paul Churchland (1942) Canadian philosopher

Source: "Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes," 1981, p. 68: About "Why folk Psychology is a theory."

Sense

“Actually, even with tested missiles, results of attacks are not really mathematically predictable. The probability of extreme variations in performance, the upper and lower limits, cannot be calculated accurately. But laymen or narrow professionals persist in regarding the matter as a simple problem in engineering and physics.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

Mathematics, Problem

“People in these fields no longer agree that such things as norms, values, and personality really exist or account for much; these concepts may only give a false sense of order to a world that both the academic and the person in the street desperately want to order. Sociology, too, is having some difficulty swallowing the simple, obvious proposition that attitudes predict behavior.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

The proposition that morale predicts productivity is just one specification of this.
Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. 115

People, World, Behavior, Sense

“It was early 1932, when Einstein and I both were at the California Institute of Technology in Pasedena, and we just decided to look for a simple relativistic model that agreed reasonably well with the known observational data, namely, the Hubble recession rate and the mean density of matter in the universe. So we took the space curvature to be zero and also the cosmological constant and the pressure term to be zero, and then it follows straightforwardly that the density is proportional to the square of the Hubble constant. It gives a value for the density that is high, but not impossibly high. That's about all there was to it. It was not an important paper, although Einstein apparently thought that it was. He was pleased to have a simple model with no cosmological constant. That's it.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

As quoted by Helge Kragh, Masters of the Universe: Conversations with Cosmologists of the Past (2014)

Universe

“There is no revolution like the Communist revolution. You simply burn all the books, kill all of the thinking people and use the poor proletariat to create a very simple benchmark to gauge social change.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Truth to Power, 2008

People, Books, Thinking, Gauge

“[W]hen the White House refused to speak directly and clearly about this matter, we were weakened as a nation and a tyrant was strengthened… The dodge on Putin broke with the basic American moral tradition. It broke faith with our core values. It broke trust with freedom seekers across the globe… To those who struggle, we have always said, ‘we see you, and we stand with you.’ These simple truths matter. The moral responsibilities of the office of the presidency matter, and when we don't affirm these basic truths, it is a failure to who we are. It is a failure to do what we do, and it is a betrayal, not just to the millions of people who are denied free and fair elections in Russia this week, but it is a failure to people all across the globe who are struggling in darkness against tyrants.”

Ben Sasse (1972) American university president and politician

As quoted in "Sasse Slams White House's Handling of 'Putin's Phony, Sham Re-Election'" http://www.weeklystandard.com/sasse-slams-white-houses-handling-of-putins-phony-sham-re-election/article/2012024#.WrLij2F635I.twitter (21 March 2018), by Jenna Lifhits, The Weekly Standard

People, Truth, Faith, Failure

“In other words, making the most effective use of our female soldiers makes good sense. It enhances our capability. That is a simple truth.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Truth, Sense

“By just taking a breath you're moving into attention a little bit and so you get much less caught up in reactivity. A practical application of this in your life is, never say anything before you've taken one breath. It's a very simple practice--changes the dynamics of conversation with other people completely.”

Ken McLeod (1948) Canadian lama

Awakening from Belief http://www.unfetteredmind.org/karma-traditional-modern-9b. Unfettered Mind http://www.unfetteredmind.org (2005-06-09) (Topic: Life)

Life, People, Change

“A simple box is really a complicated thing.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

Box of delights http://www.newstatesman.com/node/147350, NewStatesman.com, 23 February 2004 Attributed from posthumous publications

Box

“The desire to explain what is simple by what is complex, what is easy by what is difficult, is a calamity affecting the whole body of science, known, it is true, to men of insight, but not generally admitted.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Maxim 611, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Men, Science

“It is rather remarkable that the majority of learned men have closed their minds to what seemed bare and simple facts to many people.”

Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) British physicist

Raymond, p. 367 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t80k3mq4s;view=1up;seq=409 Raymond, or Life and Death (1916)

Men, People, Learning

“Simple rules can have complex consequences. This simple rule has such a wealth of implications that it is worth examining in detail. It is the far from self-evident guiding principle of reductionism and of most modern investigations into cosmic complexity. Reductionism will not be truly successful until physicists and cosmologists demonstrate that the large-scale phenomena of the world arise from fundamental physics alone. This lofty goal is still out of reach. There is uncertainty not only in how physics generates the structures of our world but also in what the truly fundamental rules of physics are.”

William Poundstone (1955) American writer

The Recursive Universe (1985), p. 31

World, Success, Wealth

“I am writing to you in the hope that the conflict in Vietnam can be brought to an end. That conflict has already taken a heavy toll-in lives lost, in wounds inflicted, in property destroyed, and in simple human misery. If we fail to find a just and peaceful solution, history will judge us harshly.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Letter to Ho Chi Minh (1967)

Peace, Hope, History

“To any thinking person, it must be obvious that there is something badly wrong in relations between human beings and the animals that human beings rely on for food; and that in the past 100 or 150 years whatever is wrong has become wrong on a huge scale, as traditional animal husbandry has been turned into an industry using industrial methods of production. … It would be a mistake to idealise traditional animal husbandry as the standard by which the animal-products industry falls short: traditional animal husbandry is brutal enough, just on a smaller scale. A better standard by which to judge both practices would be the simple standard of humanity: is this truly the best that human beings are capable of?”

J.M. Coetzee (1940) South African writer

“ Animals can't speak for themselves - it's up to us to do it! http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/animals-cant-speak-for-themselves--its-up-to-us-to-do-it/2007/02/21/1171733841769.html,” in theage.com.au (February 22, 2007)

Food, Thinking, Past, Animals

“In 1925 Heisenberg made a new attempt, on entirely novel lines, to obtain an explanation of atomic spectra. Working in collaboration with Bohr, he had come to the conclusion that the imperfections of Bohr's theory had been a consequence of assuming too simple a model for the atom. For Bohr had not only assumed that the atom consisted of particles moving through space and time, but also that the particles inside atoms were of the same kind as the electrons outside atoms.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Time

“For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was an admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever. Similar tactics had been adopted during the eighteenth century and for the same reasons… The men of the new Enlightenment, which occurred in the middle years of the nineteenth century, once again used meaninglessness as a weapon against the reactionaries. The Victorian passion for respectability was, however, so great that, during the period when they were formulated, neither Positivism nor Darwinism was used as a justification for sexual indulgence.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

Ends and Means (1937)

Men, People, World, Way

“The idea of creativity is for me the problem of the future. Since the creative power is not a simple thing. It has a rich structure. It is divided into a lot of different principles and represented by figures, and these figures you can also write down in a kind of symbolic mantra. It is important to work on every point of creativity and see how the human being stands in the energy that comes out from the surrounding world.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote in a conversation between Lama Sogyal Rinpoché and Joseph Beuys, 1982; republished in: Joseph Beuys, Carin Kuoni. Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man. New York, 1993. p. 197
1980's

World, Idea, Problem, Future