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Simplicity Quotes

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Simplicity Quotes

“Consumption isn’t just about taking—it’s also about sharing, repurposing, and honoring the life cycle of the things we use.”

“If the forest were covered with ten times the number of blue markers I had seen on my hike, the probability of my getting lost would certainly be reduced. One could imagine the markers organized in a more symbolic shape—say a real arrow, instead of a cryptic linear marker. And if we wish to go that far, why not just paint the more explicit text, "This way," on the rocks in 100-point Helvetica so there's no ambiguity whatsoever? Yet at some point, with the successive addition of more sophisticated elements, the true value of the untainted forest suddenly vanishes.”

“Look north, he said, In the middle of that vast plain is a single lonely peak. In the light of the setting sun you can just make out the ruins of A-fang-kung, the palace of the great Ch'in Shih-huang, among the weeds and the high grass. Look west. The wind is rustling the woods where the gray mountain mist hides Mou-ling, the tomb of Emperor Han Wu-ti. In the east you can see the white wall reflecting the green hills where a red rooftop pierces the sky and the pale moon comes and goes. No one leans on the on the jade balustrades at Huang-ch'ing-kung where Emperor Hsuan Tsung frolicked with his ill-fated concubine Yang Kue-fei. Those three emperors were for ten millennia the heroes of our history. Where are they now? [Fenkl translation]”

“I do not particularly like the word 'work.' Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think that is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings by living, but people work like crazy, thinking that they have to in order to stay alive. The bigger the job, the greater the challenge, the more wonderful they think it is. It would be good to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable life with plenty of free time. I think that the way animals live in the tropics, stepping outside in the morning and evening to see if there is something to eat, and taking a long nap in the afternoon, must be a wonderful life. For human beings, a life of such simplicity would be possible if one worked to produce directly his daily necessities. In such a life, work is not work as people generally think of it, but simply doing what needs to be done.”

“I strongly believe that success is directly proprotional to one's ability to be simple and comfortable. In fact, simplicity and comfort have a multiplication effect, thus increasing the chances of expedited and sustained success.”

“[The] structural theory is of extreme simplicity. It assumes that the molecule is held together by links between one atom and the next: that every kind of atom can form a definite small number of such links: that these can be single, double or triple: that the groups may take up any position possible by rotation round the line of a single but not round that of a double link: finally that with all the elements of the first short period [of the periodic table], and with many others as well, the angles between the valencies are approximately those formed by joining the centre of a regular tetrahedron to its angular points. No assumption whatever is made as to the mechanism of the linkage. Through the whole development of organic chemistry this theory has always proved capable of providing a different structure for every different compound that can be isolated. Among the hundreds of thousands of known substances, there are never more isomeric forms than the theory permits.”

“I suspect that 'Kindness and Cruelty' and 'Mercy and Justice' all have secret affairs, as though they rendezvous only within certain sophisticated souls: those who hate being offensive, but love telling the truth.”

“Every year that I live here it is as though another of my personalities is left behind, like a variation in a Passacaglia, leaving me nearer the first and last plain theme. It is not only that as one grows older the passions and vanities fade, nor that the pressure of the present day obliges one to live an ever simpler life, to make and to do with one's own hands whatever is necessary, to be forever saying goodbye to civilization. It is rather that civilization has turned to shoddy, plastic and sham, has become a cage with bars of cliché, so that one must get out. Here on my island the years have opened like a rose in the sun, the fury of standardization has missed one little byway, and events have remained in their real dimension as reactions of the human heart, limitless, yet dependent on its fleeting pulse.”