Simplification Quotes

“One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way -- said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection

“Order and simplification are the first steps towards mastery of a subject”
― Thomas Mann

“Simplifying your life is about simplifying yourself.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Holden... One short, faintly stuffy, pedagogical question. Don't you think there's a time and place for everything? Don't you think if someone starts out to tell you about his father's farm, he should stick to his guns, then get around to telling you about his uncle's brace? Or, if his uncle's brace is such a provocative subject, shouldn't he have selected it in the first place as his subject—not the farm?'
I didn't feel much like thinking and answering and all. I had a headache and I felt lousy. I even had sort of a stomach-ache, if you want to know the truth.
'Yes—I don't know. I guess he should. I mean I guess he should've picked his uncle as a subject, instead of the farm, if that interested him most. But what I mean is, lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most. I mean you can't help it sometimes. What I think is, you're supposed to leave somebody alone if he's at least being interesting and he's getting all excited about something. I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice. You just didn't know this teacher, Mr. Vinson. He could drive you crazy sometimes, him and the goddam class. I mean he'd keep telling you to unify and simplify all the time. Some things you just can't do that to. I mean you can't hardly ever simplify and unify something just because somebody wants you to.”
― J.D. Salinger

“If we could see our lives from God's perspective, many of us would be forced to admit that our lives are cluttered with all sorts of things that keep us from moving forward and receiving the abundant life he promises. We need to simplify our lives, eliminating the things that bog us down and keep us from doing what God says are priorities.”
― Randy Carlson, The Power of One Thing: How to Intentionally Change Your Life

“our perceptions of the external world are habitually clouded by the verbal notions in terms of which we do our thinking. We are for ever attempting to convert things into signs for the more intelligible abstractions of our own invention. But in doing so, we rob these things of a great deal of their native thinghood.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“Family is not disparate relationships between individuals and machines, in separate rooms of a house. Childhood is not a race to accumulate all of the consumer goods and stresses of adulthood in record time. Simplification signals a change and makes room for transformation. It is a stripping away that invites clarity.”
― Kim John Payne, Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids

“With simplification we can bring an infusion of inspiration to our daily lives; set a tone that honors our families' needs before the world's demands. Allow our hopes for our children to outweigh our fears. Realign our lives with our dreams for our family, and our hopes for what childhood could and should be.”
― Kim John Payne, Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids

“When we simplify, we are attending to our minds. Clear
minds lead to creativity, vision, health, and productivity.”
― Angela Lynne Craig, Pivot Leadership: Small Steps...Big Change

“Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“How to accept the diversity and mutilation of the world, while retaining the minds power for analogy and unity, so this changing world shall not become meaningless?”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still" (51).”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I didn’t “grow” wise, spiritual, or happy.. I shrunk towards it. I didn’t add; I subtracted… There is wisdom in simplification… There is strength in recognizing that life is too short for nonsense… You find yourself spending time with people who make you laugh… Those who make you feel loved.. Simplify your life.. .that’s where happiness is found.”
― Steve Maraboli

“Nothing is more complex than simplification; what art takes from enigma it more than replenishes in the instantiation of itself, in the labyrinthine puzzle it plants in history. The intensification of enigma. The luxuriantly problematic loam of existence is built out of the sedimented aeons of residues deposited by the will to power, the impulse to create.”
― Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007

“Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.”
― Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

“Macaroni
When i realize that every person has a head full of stuff that looks like macaroni that is governing their behavior it's easier for me to accept that i don't understand them and they don't understand me.
Just for today ill try to remember that I'm dealing with macaroni.”
― Tim Merritte

“The need to live by secure, sharply etched classifications is buried deep in the human mind and one of its earliest demands; simplicity allays anxieties by defeating discriminations. Real situations are rarely clear-cut, real feelings often nests of ambivalence. This is something the adult learns to recognize and to tolerate, if he is fortunate; it is a strenuous insight from which he will regress at the first opportunity. That is why the liberal temper, which taught men to live with uncertainties and ambiguities, the most triumphant achievement of nineteenth-century culture, was so vulnerable to the assaults of cruder views of the world, to bigotry, chauvinism, and other coarse and simplistic classifications. "Every society," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in one of his most brilliant aphorisms, "has the tendency to degrade and, as it were, to starve out, its adversaries—at least in its perception." The criminal, he thought, was one victim of such a regressive process; so was the Jew. And "among artists, the 'philistine and bourgeois' becomes a caricature." And artists, the avant-gardes, Nietzsche might have added, only set the tone for the wider culture. Class consciousness, which emerged fitfully and then more and more fully and aggressively towards the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century, enshrined such a caricature: a mixture and social reality and unconscious needs.”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

“... a human looks at a tree it translates the intricately complex mass of leaves and branches into this thing called ‘tree’.
To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.
She knew that everything humans see is a simplification. A human sees the world in three
dimensions. That is a simplification. Humans are fundamentally limited, generalising creatures, living on auto-pilot, who straighten out curved streets in their minds, which explains why they get lost all the time.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“It's bad to make general statements about groups of people--there are always exceptions, and those exceptions are likely to be offended if they hear you generalizing about them.”
― Mira Grant, How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea

“People are drawn to clarity and away from confusion”
― Donald Miller

“People love walking around with labels attached to them by others or labels they give themselves. They are prisoners of roles they did not choose, punished by systems they did not design, and shaped by forces they cannot name”
― Sov8840

“People love walking around with labels attached to them by others or labels they give themselves. They are prisoners of roles they did not choose, punished by systems they did not design, and shaped by forces they cannot name.”
― Sov8840

“Imagining someone who will not collapse my complexity into compressed and simplified roles like friend, lover, genius, or ghost... such a being exists only in my dream world.”
― Sov8840

“...All of these writings could be reduced to mere “thought-provoking content,” for the system devours everything in its path like a never-satisfied monster—even its own “critics,” or perhaps especially its “critics.” The system sells even its own “resistance,” which is why “counterculture” is, in fact, bound to and created by the very thing it claims to oppose.”
― Sov8840

“THE 3 LAWS
Simplify Before You Add
Clarity Before Clever
Results Before Activity”
― Greg Born, The 3 Laws: Escape Chaos, Unlock Clarity, Achieve Epic Results

“Simple beats clever every time.”
― Greg Born, The 3 Laws: Escape Chaos, Unlock Clarity, Achieve Epic Results

“The Simplicity Test
1. "Would my grandmother understand this?"
2. "Would I want to explain this at a cocktail party?"
3. "Would I bet my own money on this working?”
― Greg Born, The 3 Laws: Escape Chaos, Unlock Clarity, Achieve Epic Results

“Before you make any decision tomorrow, ask yourself:
• Does this simplify or complicate?
• Does this clarify or confuse?
• Does this drive results or just create activity?”
― Greg Born, The 3 Laws: Escape Chaos, Unlock Clarity, Achieve Epic Results

“Every minute wasted on complexity
is a minute stolen from creation.”
― Greg Born, The 3 Laws: Escape Chaos, Unlock Clarity, Achieve Epic Results

“Every company is perfectly designed
to get the results it's getting—
change the design, change the results.”
― Greg Born, The 3 Laws: Escape Chaos, Unlock Clarity, Achieve Epic Results