Really to live requires a great deal of love, a great feeling for silence, a great simplicity with an abundance of experience; it requires a mind that is capable of thinking very clearly, that is not bound by prejudice or superstition, by hope or fear.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things
Ideals are a curse because they prevent you from thinking directly, simply and truly, when you are faced with facts. The ideal, the what should be, is an escape from what is. The what is is the fact that you are afraid—afraid of what your parents will say, of what people will think, afraid of society, afraid of disease, death; and if you face what is, look at it, go into it even though it brings you misery, and understand it, then you will find that your mind becomes extraordinarily simple, clear; and in that very clarity there is the cessation of fear.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things
Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
—R. Buckminster Fuller
The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizzare which seems inherent in them.
—Jean Cocteau
Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be.
—Jim Horning
Simplicity doesn't mean to live in misery and poverty. You have what you need, and you don't want to have what you don't need.
—Charan Singh
Isn't it nice… once you've outgrown the ideas of what life should be and you just enjoy what it is.
—Taylor Jenkins Reid in After I Do
You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it's not that simple.
—Richard Adams in Watership Down
What's complicated? I love you. You love me. It's the simplest thing in the world.
—Marie Coulson in Bound Together
Simplicity is natures first step, and the last of art.
—Philip James Bailey
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity,
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires.
—Laozi
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.
—Albert Einstein
Seek simplicity, and distrust it.
—Alfred North Whitehead
It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences.
—Aristotle