How To Simplify Quotes & Sayings

I flipped down the visor so I could check myself in the mirror, and something small and heavy dropped into my lap.
I froze, my breath stuck in my throat. What - ?
Gingerly, I looked down. It wasn't a grenade. It was a key ring. One key was for this van. I looked at it blankly.
"Well, that'll simplify things," Fang said. — James Patterson

I ain't looking to compete with you, beat, or cheat, or mistreat you, simplify you, classify you, deny, defy, or crucify you. All I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you. — Bob Dylan

Jesus, help me to simplify my life by learning what you want me to be and becoming that person. — Therese Of Lisieux

Sex complicates, but it is the power of love to simplify. — Geoff Ryman

You have to know everything. You have to know how to light a scene. You have to know all this technical stuff about directing. No, you don't. You can know as much or as little as you have to. Your main job is to get great performances and tell the story correctly and capture it correctly. Then it's just basically yours to complicate or simplify as much as you want. — Paul Feig

The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life; it's so easy to make it complex. — Yvon Chouinard

It is in the face of all this visual chaos, so opposed to order and simplicity, that I suddenly, perhaps a little guiltily, recall my vow to simplify my life. When I made that promise I had in mind the image of the ancient Greek subsisting on a fragment of pungent cheese, coarse bread, a handful of sun-warmed olives, a little watered wine; a man who discussed the Good, the True, the Beautiful with grave delight, and piped clear music in a sylvan glade. But I feel the absence of hills clothed in myrtle and thyme; of the Great Mother, Homer's wine-dark sea. Good resolutions, it seems, require good scenery. — Guy Vanderhaeghe

People are weird. We do live on all levels at the same time and you can be fighting and flirting, and there can be fury and sexual tension. All that stuff can co-exist so it's just a testament to how complex we are. Or maybe it's a testament to how boringly we try and simplify everything. — Alice Eve

Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. — Henry David Thoreau

Generally, I've observed, we seek changes that fall into the "Essential Seven." People - including me - most want to foster the habits that will allow them to: 1. Eat and drink more healthfully (give up sugar, eat more vegetables, drink less alcohol) 2. Exercise regularly 3. Save, spend, and earn wisely (save regularly, pay down debt, donate to worthy causes, stick to a budget) 4. Rest, relax, and enjoy (stop watching TV in bed, turn off a cell phone, spend time in nature, cultivate silence, get enough sleep, spend less time in the car) 5. Accomplish more, stop procrastinating (practice an instrument, work without interruption, learn a language, maintain a blog) 6. Simplify, clear, clean, and organize (make the bed, file regularly, put keys away in the same place, recycle) 7. Engage more deeply in relationships - with other people, with God, with the world (call friends, volunteer, have more sex, spend more time with family, attend religious services) — Gretchen Rubin

My dad is an engineer and works on green energy, so I'm very aware of what it takes to keep a modern home running and how we can simplify. — Rachel Boston

But even them, my pains, I understand ill. That must come from my not being all pain and nothing else. There's the rub. Then they recede, or I, till they fill me with amaze and wonder, seen from a better planet. Not often, but I ask no more. Catch-cony life! To be nothing but pain, how that would simplify matters! Omnidolent! Impious dream. — Samuel Beckett

How badly I want that nameless thing! First there must be an idea, a feeling ... Maybe it was an abstract idea that you've got to find a symbol for, or maybe it was a concrete form that you have to simplify or distort to meet your ends, but that starting point must pervade the whole. — Emily Carr

Children, we should simplify our life's needs and use the resulting savings for charity. — Mata Amritanandamayi

Simplification establishes an unspoken emphasis on relationship. — Kim John Payne

There is a lot of interesting product coming to market already. Bags and bottles and cups and such made of potato starch and other fully biodegradable materials. In some sense, plastic is more chemically complex. We ought to be able to simplify. — Edward Norton

To simplify your life, just think of yourself as a four-year-old child. Try to imagine the way he thinks of reality. If you have to talk to someone about a so-called complicated matter, see how you can simplify it.
No matter with whom you are talking, feel that you are a child and that person is also a child. When a childlike quality comes into your life, everything automatically becomes simple. — Sri Chinmoy

True consecration to Christ simplifies life, for it leaves the management to Him. — J. Sidlow Baxter

Nutshells close and encapsulate, shelter and protect, reduce and simplify, while everything in deconstruction is turned toward opening, exposure, expansion, and complexification, toward releasing unheard of, undreamt of possibilities to come, toward cracking nutshells wherever they appear. — John D. Caputo

The more you limit your choices, thereby limiting thought, the more you can simplify your life and focus your energy elsewhere. — Cory Booker

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

I'd probably long ago have gone seven kinds of crazy, one for each day of the week, if I didn't simplify my life in every area where I do have some control. — Dean Koontz

Because we cannot deal with the many as individuals, we sometimes try to simplify the many into an abstraction called the mass. Because we cannot deal with the complexity of the present, we often over-ride it and live in a simplified dream of the future. Because we cannot solve our own problems right here at home, we talk about problems out there in the world. An escape process goes on from the intolerable burden we have placed upon ourselves. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

To simplify is about enhancing our ability to focus on things that really matter, to deliberately choose our priorities, and to refuse to let unimportant things take over the things of real importance. — Carolyn J. Rasmus

Through my years as a writer, I've learnt how to simplify the message and pen songs that have a more specific quality - it's not just about my ego and trying to meet girls. — Jason Mraz

I think the exercise of trying to figure out how to simplify concepts has been incredibly helpful to me over the last 13 years of teaching and I hope my students have benefited from it. — Joel Greenblatt

The model I like to sort of simplify the notion of what goes on in a market for common stocks is the pari-mutuel system at the racetrack. If you stop to think about it, a pari-mutuel system is a market. Everybody goes there and bets and the odds change based on what's bet. That's what happens in the stock market. — Charlie Munger

If you want to gain market share at your competitor's expense - look for a customer that's suffering from too much complexity and simplify it. — Peter Cohan

You are now equipped to use the Hook Model to ask yourself these five fundamental questions for building effective hooks: 1. What do users really want? What pain is your product relieving? (Internal Trigger) 2. What brings users to your service? (External Trigger) 3. What is the simplest action users take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier? (Action) 4. Are users fulfilled by the reward, yet left wanting more? (Variable Reward) 5. What "bit of work" do users invest in your product? Does it load the next trigger and store value to improve the product with use? (Investment) — Nir Eyal

A man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied; he must know how to disengage what is essential from the detail in which it is enwrapped, for everything cannot be equally considered; in a word, he must be able to simplify his duties, his business and his life. — Henri Frederic Amiel

It was as if he'd suddenly become intimately aware of the fragility of life and how precious time really was. As a result, he made a conscious effort to simplify his life, with the goal of eliminating unnecessary stress. No longer interested in society's definition of success, he began purging his life of material things. Life, he decided, was for living, not for having, and he wanted to experience every moment that he could. At the deepest level, he'd come to understand that life could end at any moment, and it was better to be be happy than busy. — Micah Sparks

The architect should strive continually to simplify; the ensemble of the rooms should then be carefully considered that comfort and utility may go hand in hand with beauty. — Frank Lloyd Wright

Gossip columnists patrol their mundane arena with the same sort of mysterious merit the advice-givers do. Plainly put, how does anyone become a gossip columnist? I can't simplify it down to a lower scale than that. Are there universities that offer courses in gossip writing? How about plain old Gossip 111? Are there that many literate people who could not write a gossip column? What then, qualifies the chosen few above the rest? — Donald Jeffries

How can trade be bad if you don't make money
even when it's good?" inquired Gleed, reasonably
applying the information Harrison had given him.
Jeff's big moon eyes went over him slowly then
turned to Harrison. "So he's another bum off your
boat, eh? What's he talking about?"
"Money," explained Harrison. "It's stuff we use to
simplify trade. It's printed stuff, like documentary
obs of various sizes."
"That tells me a lot," Jeff Baines observed. "It
tells a crowd that has to make a printed record of
every ob is not to be trusted - because they don't
even trust each other. — Eric Frank Russell

If Epicurus were speaking to you at this moment, he would urge you to simplify life. Here's how he might put it if he were standing here today : Lads,your needs are few, they are easily attained, and any necessary suffering can be easily tolerated. Don't complicate your life with such trivial goals as riches and fame: they are the enemy of ATARAXIA. Fame,for example,consist of the opinions of
others and requires that we must live our life as other wish. To achieve and maintain fame, we must like what others like and shun whatever it is that they shun. Hence, a life of fame or a life in politics? Flee from it. And wealth? Avoid it! It is a trap. The more we acquire the more we crave, and the deeper our sadness when our yearning is not satisfied. Lads, listen to me: If you crave happiness, do not waste your life struggling for that which you really do not need. — Irvin D. Yalom

I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. — Henry David Thoreau

I have a heart problem, so I have to simplify my life and be content with memories and friends and music. — Gian Carlo Menotti

Great men simplify great principles and make them easily intelligible to ordinary men — Tunku Abdul Rahman

The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client. — William S. Burroughs

Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise ... not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message. — William Bernbach

We've gone through the operating system and looked at everything and asked how can we simplify this and make it more powerful at the same time. — Steve Jobs

In order to seek one's own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life. — Plato

Simplify the complicated, untangle the tangled, follow the threads, to the heart of the matter. — Jane Teresa Anderson

Force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do. — Keith Rabois

You know who a complicated tax code kills? The guy or gal trying to start a business out of the spare bedroom of their home. So we've got to simplify our tax code. — Marco Rubio

Being able to change the lives of people around me motivates me. I always try to build technology and innovations that solve problems, simplify people's lives, and give others what they want. — Jeet Banerjee

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them. — Neko Case

I don't even know what I'm looking for, although I hope I'll know it if I find it along the way. Sometimes I want to simplify my life into a simple bare thing. And other times I want to complicate it so thoroughly that everything I touch will become bound in some way to me. I've become quite aware of my contradictions, but there's no true resolution in that. — David Levithan

You will be amazed to see how just one moment of truth has the potential to simplify your struggles! — Anuranjita Kumar

Do not try to be pretty. You were not meant to be pretty; you were meant to burn down the earth and graffiti the sky. Don't let anyone ever simplify you to just 'pretty'. — Anonymous

I think we need to simplify our tax code, but not as a way of generating revenue, as a way of making our tax code more growth- friendly. — Marco Rubio

In the beginning we must simplify the subject, thus unavoidably falsifying it, and later we must sophisticate away the falsely simple beginning. — Maimonides

The more I simplify my life, the happier I feel. — Bradford Winters

learned that life is as simple or as complicated as you make it. I had chosen to simplify my life to include only the best things: my family, friends, and the mountains. — Jeff Alt

I think that's necessary in photography. We try to simplify the chaos that's out there - and that's true of the natural world as well as the mad-made world. Clearly, it's easier in the mad-made world because it has already been structured. — Bruce Barnbaum

Simplify? Let me try. In school days, we are taught that if there are four animals in a room and you add two more, the total will be six. That is logic. But behind this logic, there are underlying assumptions. Now, if somebody tells you, there are four rats in the room and if you add two more cats in the room, how many animals in total exist in the room now? The answer will depend upon assumption. If you just use your mathematical brain, you will say six animals. If you use your human brain, you will say two animals. Why two animals? Because the two cats will eat the four rats in no time. — Ravindra Shukla

The whole object of science is to synthesize, and so simplify; and did we but know the uttermost of a subject we could make it singularly clear. — Percival Lowell

I suggest that what artists do in all media can be summarized as deliberately performing the operations that occur instinctively during a ritualized behaviour: they simplify or formalize, repeat (sometimes with variation), exaggerate, and elaborate in both space and time for the purpose of attracting attention and provoking and manipulating emotional response. — Ellen Dissanayake

The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has as yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we. The most distinct and beautiful statements of any truth must take at last the mathematical form. We might so simplify the rules of moral philosophy, as well as of arithmetic, that one formula would express them both. — Henry David Thoreau

Overload 'em with information an' they'll kill yeh jus' to simplify things. — J.K. Rowling

To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry. — Paul Rand