I’m just a simple country girl.

There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.

There is a certain majesty in simplicity which is far above all the quaintness of wit.

I don’t really have any gimmicks. I don’t actually do anything that’s strange. I don’t even wear weird things.

Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.

That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

When I came to Johannesburg from the countryside, I knew nobody, but many strangers were very kind to me. I then was dragged into politics, and then, subsequently, I became a lawyer.

Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer to be tricked.

I describe myself as a simple Buddhist monk. No more, no less.

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.

I’m so glad I never feel important, it does complicate life!

I am a simple Buddhist monk – no more, no less.

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ.

I don’t let my religious world get too complicated.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Take the complications, rules, shoulds, musts, have tos, and so on out of your life. By uncomplicating your life and removing the trivial pursuits that occupy so much of it, you open a channel for the genius within you to emerge.

I love a natural look in pictures.

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.

It’s rural America. It’s where I came from. We always refer to ourselves as real America. Rural America, real America, real, real, America.

We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself.

Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

When you are enthusiastic about what you do, you feel this positive energy. It’s very simple.

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness.

The greatest wealth is to live content with little.

Issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

The complexity of things – the things within things – just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

Simplify, simplify.

Of Manners gentle, of Affections mild; In Wit a man; Simplicity, a child.

I try to speak plainly so that my constituents who don’t follow the nuances of government like I do, because they’re too busy earning a real living, can understand the issues before me. None of this stuff is brain surgery.

Everything in war is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult.

I don’t have people following me around, like bodyguards. I don’t know how people live like that. Maybe the young movie stars have to live like that, I don’t know. But it seems a little crazy to me. I don’t think you need all that stuff.

I could sing you a thousand and one doo-wop songs. I love the simplicity in that music. It’s not super-poetic, it’s just from the heart.

In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people’s perspectives… I really try and live the mission of the company and… keep everything else in my life extremely simple.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.

Part of the reason there’s an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you’re in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let’s say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.

I think business has to be stupider. I want to do really straightforward, stupid business – just talk to me like a 4-year-old. And I refuse to negotiate. I do not negotiate. I can collaborate. But I’m an artist, so as soon as you negotiate, you’re being compromised.

If you realize all the time what’s kind of wonderful – that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience – every once in a while, we have these integrations when everything’s pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

I’ve only wanted paper and beautiful colors. It was my dream, and it still is my dream. And books. They’re all I need, and the rest I can do without.

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics – greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

I live a reasonably simple life, off the beaten track.

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

Elegance is achieved when all that is superfluous has been discarded and the human being discovers simplicity and concentration: the simpler and more sober the posture, the more beautiful it will be.

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don’t try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.

Elegance is refusal.

There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.

Find joy and solace in the simple, and cultivate your utopia by feeling the Tao in every cubic inch of space.

I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it’s poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.