Simple Plans Quotes & Sayings

My plans were vague. I talked liberty to many of my friends and, you know how it is, when one talks liberty everything seems beautifully simple. One expects all gates to open and all walls to fall flat and all voices to shout for joy. — Robert Graves

The Romans, accordingly, admiring the prudence and virtues of Numa, assented to all the measures which he recommended. This, however, is to be said, that the circumstance of these times being deeply tinctured with religious feeling, and of the men with whom he had to deal being rude and ignorant, gave Numa better facility to carry out his plans, as enabling him to mould his subjects readily to any new impression. And, doubtless, he who should seek at the present day to form a new commonwealth, would find the task easier among a race of simple mountaineers, than among the dwellers in cities where society is corrupt; as the sculptor can more easily carve a fair statue from a rough block, than from the block which has been badly shaped out by another. — Niccolo Machiavelli

To simplify things down to their real essence, whenever things go wrong in our lives, whenever our plans go awry and the things we took for granted suddenly disappear, we have a very simple choice. We can either succumb to despair and assume the attitude of the put upon victim, powerless to change our fate, or we can decide to turn the tragedy into an opportunity. — Tony Clark

To some people, surrender may have negative connotations, implying defeat, giving up, failing to rise to the challenges of life, becoming lethargic, and so on. True surrender, however, is something entirely different. It does not mean to passively put up with whatever situation you find yourself in and to do nothing about it. Nor does it mean to cease making plans or initiating positive action. Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. — Eckhart Tolle

When Aaron arrived at my place - a ground-floor studio fitting my full-size bed, desk, and TV - he came bearing gifts: The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron and two red tension balls. "I figure they'll help you relax and write," he said. We watched my favorite relationship — Janet Mock

I just consider being one of the luckiest people in the sense that creativity came to me and it flowed. — Vidal Sassoon

One of the central flaws in the state of contemporary music is that the major record companies have failed to incorporate that simple fact into their business plans. They've come into an industry that's based on idiosyncratic artists and tried to erase every idiosyncratic aspect out of it. — Moby

Nature offers us a thousand simple pleasers- Plays of light and color, fragrance in the air, the sun's warmth on skin and muscle, the audible rhythm of life's stir and push- for the price of merely paying attention. What joy! But how unwilling or unable many of us are to pay this price in an age when manufactured sources of stimulation and pleasure are everywhere at hand. For me, enjoying nature's pleasures takes conscious choice, a choice to slow down to seed time or rock time, to still the clamoring ego, to set aside plans and busyness, and to simply to be present in my body, to offer myself up.
Respond to the above quote. Pay special attention to each of your five senses as you describe your surroundings. Also, you need to incorporate at least one metaphor and smile in your descriptions. — Lorraine Anderson

Finally it was probably less the poverty that bred crime than the sour stench of racism that hung over anyplace where people are separated out by kind. — Robert B. Parker

As parents we carry the blueprints, the dreams of what our family could be. The plans change, the whole thing goes way over budget, there are unexpected additions, and the work never ends. Still, through the messiness of construction we see each other with such depth and hope. Our five year-old boy is still so clearly the baby he once was and sometimes - can you see it? - the young man he will one day be. We draw energy and inspiration from our dreams; our simple, common motivations.
SIMPLICITY PARENTING — Lisa Ross

Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human. — Peter Thiel

It goes on, he thought. The internecine hate. Perhaps the seeds are there, in that. They will eat one another at last, and leave the rest of us here and there in the world, still alive. Still enough of us once more to build and hope and make a few simple plans. — Philip K. Dick

You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one gritty path you've got your eyes on the other the whole time, certain that you're making a mistake. — Jodi Picoult

My plans for this day are simple: Step one accomplished, I woke up. Now take a moment to be thankful for my gift. The gift of another chance. I have been blessed to have another day with my loved ones and the people I care about. Next step, Choose to be Happy. Remembering that it is a choice. If this were to be my last day, I would not want to live it with hate, anger or discontent in my heart. Last step, Attack Life! Remind myself to never take the gift of another day for granted, because unfortunately this morning there are many that will not complete step one. — Joe Bailey

All my boyhood, all I ever wanted was to be loved. — Norman Wisdom

Chickens are true creatures of zen - they live only and absolutely for the moment. Their actions one particular second will not necessarily have any influence or bearing on their actions in the next second, nor are they necessarily influenced by their actions of the prior second. Chicken thoughts arrive in their tiny mad little minds like flashes of a strobe light, each light being an action, each flashing with the brilliance of a not very brilliant thing. Each action utterly random. The complete randomness of chaos. Chickens are notorious escape artists, not due to their ability to devise cunning plans as they huddle together in their coop beneath a bare light bulb, scratching out complex diagrams in the dirt, but simply out of sheet unpredictability. They are the pachinko balls of the animal kingdom, effecting their escapes through the simple device of, say, turning left for no particular reason. — Jeffery Russell

It's an addiction. I love clothes. I like to go down Melrose and look in all the windows and I go to different flea markets. I have lots of costumes. You never know when you're going to have to dress up like a milkmaid from the 1600s. — Zooey Deschanel

Life had a way of wrecking her careful plans, again and again. Roulette was more predictable than life. Small wonder she was so lucky at it.
Life was not a wheel going round and round. It never, ever returned to the same place. It didn't stick to simple red and black and a certain array of numbers. It laughed at logic.
Beneath its pretty overdress of man-imposed order, life was anarchy. — Loretta Chase

The simple index fund solution has been adopted as a cornerstone of investment strategy for many of the nation's pension plans operated by our giant corporations and state and local governments. Indexing is also the predominant strategy for the largest of them all, the retirement plan for federal government employees, the Federal Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). The plan has been a remarkable success, and now holds some $173 billion of assets for the benefit of our public servants and members of armed services. — David F. Swensen

Notice that God did much more than give Adam someone so that he wouldn't be lonely. God's solution for Adam's need was to "make him a helper suitable for him." It's important here to note that "helper" does not mean "inferior person." On the contrary, in the day when Moses penned these words, to identify a woman as a "helper" ran countercultural to the common low view of women. Moses actually elevated the sense of a woman's worth and role by calling her by the same name used in other places in the Old Testament to describe God Himself (see Pss. 30:10 and 54:4). To be called a "helper" here speaks more to the simple fact that God had plans for Adam that he could not fulfill without a mate - he was incomplete. Adam needed Eve. — David Boehi

I'm just trying to touch the world and touch the people and just get good material. And show them that we can get it done. Just because you're African American, you still can touch the masses. And that's my goal. I won't stop until that goal is continued to push it hard to the world that we are the universal person as well. — Cory Hardrict

And I can't let you out of here until I know what your plans are. (Kat)
To stop the annihilation of mankind and the earth. It's a simple plan, really, but an important one. Can I go now? (Sin) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

My dream, even now, is to walk for weeks with some friend that I love, leisurely wandering from place to place, with no route arranged and no object in view, with liberty to go on all day or to linger all day, as we choose; but the question of luggage, unknown to the simple pilgrim, is one of the rocks on which my plans have been shipwrecked, and the other is the certain censure of relatives, who, not fond of walking themselves, and having no taste for noonday naps under hedges, would be sure to paralyse my plans before they had grown to maturity by the honest horror of their cry, "How very unpleasant if you were to meet any one you know!" The relative of five hundred years back would have said "How Holy! — Elizabeth Von Arnim

And she realized, standing there, that in all her practical plans for marriage, she'd never thought about the simple pleasure of being loved. — Jude Watson

Plans must be simple and flexible ... They must be made by the people who execute them. — George S. Patton

We are having to live with paying the price for what happened before. — Felix Sabates

You know what you are?" she said. "You're a survivor who has nothing to live for. — Adam Johnson

When you know what you want you will be excited about it and give every ounce of effort to making it come true. No excuse or fear will get in your way because peace is found in focus. — Shannon L. Alder

Having an honest relationship with time is no simple task. First, you have to open up to the possibility that time is your friend, there to help you, and that recording future plans in whatever way you see fit isn't a burden but rather something that strengthens your pursuit of your dreams. — Lanna Nakone

Just the minute another person is drawn into some one's life, there begin to arise undreamed-of complexities, and from such a simple beginning as sexual desire we find built up such alarming yet familiar phenomena as fetes, divertissements, telephone conversations, arrangements, plans, sacrifices, train arrivals, meetings, appointments, tardiness, delays, marriages, dinners, small pets and animals, calumny, children, music lessons, yellow shades for the windows, evasions, lethargy, cigarettes, candies, repetition of stories and anecdotes, infidelity, ineptitude, incompatibility, bronchial trouble, and many others, all of which are entirely foreign to the original urge and way off the subject. — E.B. White

Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together. — Francesco Petrarca

Ester asked why people are sad.
"That's simple," says the old man. "They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams. — Paulo Coelho

The story of Detroit's bankruptcy was simple enough: Allow capitalism to grow the city, campaign against income inequality, tax the job creators until they flee, increase government spending in order to boost employment, promise generous pension plans to keep people voting for failure. Rinse, wash and repeat. — Ben Shapiro