Quotes & Sayings About Making Things Simpler

Making your unknown known is the important thing - and keeping the unknown always beyond you - catching - crystalizing your simpler clearer vision of life - only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead - that you must always keep working to grasp ... — Georgia O'Keeffe

By making bold cuts in spending and commonsense entitlement reforms, we will make our government simpler, smaller, and smarter. — Mitt Romney

The paradox of simplicity is that making things simpler is hard work. — Bill Jensen

Ugh!" She threw her hands in the air. "No? No? That's your favorite word, isn't it?
"It's a classic," he told her calmly, his composure only succeeding in making her more irate. "So much simpler than, say, 'ain't gonna happen' or 'not a chance in hell. — Julie Ann Walker

In art we do not make things any simpler by making simpler things. Reduction does not yield certainty, but something like its opposite, which is ambiguity and multi-valence. — Kirk Varnedoe

What is easy to miss in saying all this is that embracing complexity can actually makes things easier, simpler, and more straightforward! How much time gets spent by organizations making cases, forming detailed plans, completing analyses, and demonstrating outcomes? How much of this really gets to the heart of the situation and really determines either what to do or what has been done? Perhaps less planning but more experimentation would be not only more effective but also simpler? Perhaps more focus on the initial selecting of good professionals, allowing them more autonomy to respond more effectively to the situations they are facing, would be less time consuming than the considerable efforts put in by managers to direct, measure, and control their performance. If the world is complex, then acting congruently with that complexity can be simpler than trying to control a machine that does not exist. — Jean G. Boulton

Elegance isn't a superficial thing, it's the way mankind has found to honor life and work. That's why, when you feel uncomfortable in that position, you mustn't think that it's false or artificial: it's real and true precisely because it's difficult. That position means that both the paper and the brush feel proud of the effort you're making. The paper ceases to be a flat, colorless surface and takes on the depth of the things placed on it. Elegance is the correct posture if the writing is to be perfect. It's the same with life: when all superfluous things have been discarded, we discover simplicity and concentration. The simpler and more sober the posture, the more beautiful it will be, even though, at first, it may seem uncomfortable. — Paulo Coelho

David Shi (historian of the simple life) describes the common denominator among the various approaches to simpler living as the understanding that the making of money and the accumulation of things should not smother the purity of the soul, the life of the mind, the cohesion of the family, or the good of the society. — Duane Elgin

The challenge is about taking things that are infinitely complex and making them simpler and more understandable. — Robert Greenberg

An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and judgements simpler through knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore. — Edward De Bono

We're going to try to do more to communicate the value of activation to customers in addition to making the process simpler and more consistent. — Steve Ballmer

Music, like the visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the natural world," said Schwartz. "It emulates our sound environment in the way that visual arts emulate the visual environment." In music we hear the echo of our basic sound making instrument-the vocal tract. This explanation for human music is simpler still than Pythagoras's mathematical equations: we like the sounds that are familiar to us-specifically, we like sounds that remind us of us. — Christine Kenneally

One must look at what is needed rather than what is wanted. This is the most critical point in making life easier and simpler - need versus want. — Glen Mizrahi

Naturally they don't eschew such simpler pleasures as love-making, sea-bathing, going to the pictures. — Albert Camus

Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters - like shoe-making - we think only a specially-trained person will serve our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. — Will Durant

The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a trillion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it. — Douglas Adams

Now he had answers, but they weren't doing what answers were supposed to do: they weren't making things simpler or easier. They weren't helping. — Lev Grossman

... It's like a spiral: They keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything even simpler. And it goes on and on. — M T Anderson

Classes and routines are first and foremost intellectual tools for reducing complexity. If they're not making your job simpler, they're not doing their jobs. — Steve McConnell

And now here was Arabella, making him feel worse. Maybe that was what she always did; maybe she always made him feel worse, and he'd never really noticed before. Maybe what seemed like the ordinary rough-and-tumble of marriage, combined with hard work and London, was something simpler: the fact that added to any equation, Arabella made it worse. — John Lanchester

What are you doing?" Alain asked.
"Starting a fire, of course." Mari held up the thing in her hand. "It's a fire-starter. A really simple device. Haven't you ever seen one?"
Alain shook his head. "Never. That thing seems very complicated. I do not understand how it can work."
"How do you start fires?"
That was a Guild secret. Or was it? The elders had told him that no Mechanic could understand how it worked. What would this Mechanic say if he told her? "I use my mind to channel power to create a place where it is hot, altering the nature of the illusion there," Alain explained, "and then use my mind to put that heat on what I want to burn."
"Oh," Mechanic Mari said. "Is that actually how you visualize the process?"
"That is how it is done," Alain said.
"That's ... interesting." She grinned. "So, instead of making fire by doing something complicated or hard to understand like striking a flint, you just alter the nature of reality. That is a lot simpler. — Jack Campbell

The world would be a much simpler place if one could bring about social change merely by making a logically consistent moral argument. — Peter Singer

Simple messages travel faster, simpler designs reach the market faster and the elimination of clutter allows faster decision making. — Jack Welch

We need examples of people who, leaving Heaven to decide whether they are to rise in the world, decide for themselves that they will be happy in it, and have resolved to seek not greater wealth, but simpler pleasure; not higher fortune, but deeper felicity; making the first of possessions, self-possession; and honouring themselves in the harmless pride and calm pursuits of peace. — John Ruskin

And look, my brother, we learned to talk
very quietly and simply.
We understand each other now - there is no need for anything more.
And I say tomorrow we will become still simpler;
we'll find those words that take on the same weight in all hearts, on all lips so that we can call figs figs, and a trough a trough, so that others will smile and say: 'We're making you a hundred poems an hour'. This is what we want too.
Because we do not sing to separate ourselves from people, my brother,
we sing to bring people together. — Yiannis Ritsos

Do all those words mean the same thing?" gasped Milo. "Of course." "Certainly." "Precisely." "Exactly." "Yes," they replied in order. "Well, then," said Milo, not understanding why each one said the same thing in a slightly different way, "wouldn't it be simpler to use just one? It would certainly make more sense." "Nonsense." "Ridiculous." "Fantastic." "Absurd." "Bosh," they chorused again, and continued. "We're not interested in making sense; it's not our job," scolded the first. "Besides," explained the second, "one word is as good as another - so why not use them all? — Norton Juster

Managing time is an essential part of making life simpler. Time should be valued and treated as the limited resource it is. Through prioritizing and planning, time management becomes an integral part of day to day activities. — Susan Stovall

I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, 'want' to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don't 'want' to cut down on my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc. etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilization in which 'progress' is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men. — George Orwell