Simple Terms Quotes & Sayings

To make this journey, we'll need imagination but imagination alone is not enough because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine. This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a simple set of rules. Test ideas by experiment and observation. Build on those ideas that pass the test, reject the ones that fail, follow the evidence where ever it leads and question everything. Accept these terms and the cosmos is yours ... — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. The hand of death is about to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.
That night Kizuki died, however, I lost the ability to see death (and life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that. When it took the 17-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me as well. — Haruki Murakami

It is absolutely imperative at the outset that you come to terms with this simple yet life-changing truth: God is for you. If you don't believe that, then you'll pray small timid prayers; if you do believe it, then you'll pray big audacious prayers. — Mark Batterson

Some people say that their pets will tell them when it's time to go. I don't believe that. No animal of mine has ever told me he was ready to die. I wish it were that simple. Dogs can communicate, but they cannot talk, nor do they think in our language or on our terms. — Jon Katz

We recognize that our progress as a species does not have to be defined in terms of wealth or material and physical growth any more than our progress as individuals has to be defined in terms of physical growth. Physical growth of the body reaches a limit, but the character and the soul of the individual continues to grow, or at least has a chance to continue, often to our last breath. It is simple minded to define our well being in material terms, when that well-being has an aesthetic dimension, and intellectual dimension, a moral dimension. — Wes Jackson

You have a faculty for defining the simplest in terms of the grandiose, so that a poor devil like me can't understand it. — Malcolm Bradbury

If you take a sophisticated idea, reduce it to the simplest possible terms so that it's accessible to everybody, and don't get simple mixed up with simplistic, it's how you mount and present something that makes it engaging. — Gordon Willis

Nobody goes "AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!" when they sing it. Maybe because it puts the life adventure in such clear and simple terms. The small creature is alive and looks for adventure. Here's the drainpipe
a long tunnel going up toward some light. The spider doesn't even think about it
just goes. Disaster befalls it
rain, flood, powerful foces. And the spider is knocked down and out beyond where it started. Does the spider say, "To hell with that"? No. Sun comes out
clears things up
dries off the spider. And the small creature goes over to the drainpipe and looks up and thinks it really wants to know what is up there. — Robert Fulghum

But then of course I know perfectly well that He can't be used as a road. If you're approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all. That's what was really wrong with all those popular pictures of happy reunions 'on the further shore'; not the simple-minded and very earthly images, but the fact that they make an End of what we can get only as a by-product of the true End.
Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don't care whether I meet her or not? — C.S. Lewis

Advertising is, actually, a simple phenomenon in terms of economics. It is merely a substitute for a personal sales force - an extension, if you will, of the merchant who cries aloud his wares. — Rosser Reeves

Simple people with less education, sophistication, social ties, and professional obligations seem in general to have somewhat less difficulty in facing this final crisis than people of affluence who lose a great deal more in terms of material luxuries, comfort, and number of interpersonal relationships. It appears that people who have gone through a life of suffering, hard work, and labor, who have raised their children and been gratified in their work, have shown greater ease in accepting death with peace and dignity compared to those who have been ambitiously controlling their environment, accumulating material goods, and a great number of social relationships but few meaningful interpersonal relationships which would have been available at the end of life. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Life has to be described in pure and simple physical and physiological terms. It must be demystified and depsychologised — U.G. Krishnamurti

When you're in a relationship, if you just break it down to regular terms, people are attracted to something, and that's what they want you to be, and that's what you should just be, and for me, it's very simple - if I meet a girl and I say, 'This is what I like about you. Just continue. Every day.' — Marilyn Manson

A model is a good model if first it interprets a wide range of observations in terms of a simple and elegant model, and second if the model makes definite predictions that can be tested, and possibly falsified, by observation. — Stephen Hawking

Compounds of gaseous substances with each other are always formed in very simple ratios, so that representing one of the terms by unity, the other is 1, 2, or at most 3 ... The apparent contraction of volume suffered by gas on combination is also very simply related to the volume of one of them. — Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac

Everyone who gets sleepy at night should have a simple decent place to lay their heads, on terms they can afford to pay. — Millard Fuller

These simple terms - "come about," for example - denote procedures that are as complicated and tradition-bound as the installation of a new Pope. — Neal Stephenson

Boundaries are, in simple terms, the recognition of personal space. — Asa Don Brown

When an idea is not robust enough to stand expression in simple terms, it is a sign that it should be rejected. — Luc De Clapiers

I'm a hybrid, from a cultural perspective, but I don't think in these terms. I'm more simple than that. I'm a mammal who will live 70 years, more or less, who believes in God and likes his life. — Ashraf Barhom

The image that stands before you whilst standing in front of the mirror is unique therefore what you are, who you are and what you stand for cannot be quantified nor measured in simple terms your beyond valuable — Lebogang Lynx Bopape

I think that what I do, in terms of how I craft my words rhetorically, is fairly simple stuff. I don't mean that to denigrate myself. I mean that in the sense of, when I write, the person that I keep in mind is my mother-in-law. — John Scalzi

The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat. — Eric Schlosser

Sustainability is an economic state where the demands placed upon the environment by people and commerce can be met without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for future generations. It can also be expressed in the simple terms of an economic golden rule for the restorative economy: Leave the world better than you found it, take no more than you need, try not to harm life or the environment, make amends if you do. — Paul Hawken

I believe that almost all important, useful ideas are simple. Peter Whittle has recently put it nicely in an autobiographical essay. "If a piece of work is heavy and complicated then it is wrong." ... Some writers feel that to express their ideas in simple terms is degrading. Some use complexity to disguise the paucity of their material. In fact, simplicity is a virtue and when, as here, it is both original and useful, it can represent a real advance in knowledge. — Dennis Lindley

Here, then, is a simple rule of thumb for all of us to apply: If the words of Jesus challenge something I believe or challenge the way I live, the problem is not with Jesus. The problem is with me. Charles Spurgeon expressed this in broader, scriptural terms when he said, "If there is any verse that you would like left out of the Bible, that is the verse that ought to stick to you, like a blister, until you really attend to its teaching."31 — Michael L. Brown

It goes without saying that these effects do not suffice to annul the necessity for a "change of terrain." It also goes without saying that the choice between these two forms of deconstruction cannot be simple and unique. A new writing must weave and interlace these two motifs of deconstruction. Which amounts to saying that one must speak several languages and produce several texts at once. I would like to point out especially that the style of the first deconstruction is mostly that of the Heideggerian questions, and the other is mostly the one which dominates France today. I am purposely speaking in terms of a dominant style: because there are also breaks and changes of terrain in texts of the Heideggerian type; because the "change of terrain" is far from upsetting the entire French landscape to which I am referring; because what we need, perhaps, as Nietzsche said, is a change of "style"; and if there is style, Nietzsche reminded us, it must be plural. — Jacques Derrida

I realize that we are often wary of making these kinds of broad generalizations about different cultural groups
and with good reason. This is the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take. We want to believe that we are not prisoners of our ethnic histories. But the simple truth is that if you want to understand ... you have to go back to the past ... it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where you great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact. — Malcolm Gladwell

your balance sheet is an indication of how much you have served others ~ in terms of their standards, their values, their desires. Don't ever forget that happiness is relative. Your idea of what's good for someone else may not be shared in the slightest by that someone.
Understand, too, that I am not saying you ought to be considerate of others or that it is ethical to make people happy. It is a simple fact of life that if you do not make people happy, they aren't going to do business with you ~ on any basis. — Harry Browne

The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision. — Edward Hirsch

Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable. In terms of idea the artist is free to even surprise himself. Ideas are discovered by intuition. — Sol LeWitt

Mysticism has often been misunderstood as the attempt to escape this simple, phenomenal world to a more pure existence in heaven beyond. This is not mysticism, but Gnosticism. Biblical mysticism is the attempt to exit 'this world' to an alternative reality that pervades the old order. Its goal is to jettison the mind-set that says 'greed is good,' selfishness is normal,' and 'killing is necessary.' Mysticism in biblical terms is not escapism, as so many have caricatured it, but a fight for ethics and social change. — Walter Wink

She couldn't think of anyone else who remotely resembled him. He was complicated, almost contradictory in so many ways, yet simple, a strangely erotic combination. On the surface he was a country boy, home from war, and he probably saw himself in those terms. Yet there was so much more to him. Perhaps it was the poetry that made him different, or perhaps it was the values his father had instilled in him, growing up. Either way, he seemed to savor life more fully than others appeared to, and that was what had first attracted her to him. — Nicholas Sparks

Kindness is as simple as being grateful for the love anyone has shown you, by not destroying them because it isn't on your terms. — Shannon L. Alder

Life cannot be classified in terms of a simple neurological ladder, with human beings at the top; it is more accurate to talk of different forms of intelligence, each with its strengths and weaknesses. This point was well demonstrated in the minutes before last December's tsunami, when tourists grabbed their digital cameras and ran after the ebbing surf, and all the 'dumb' animals made for the hills. — Brian Reynolds Myers

As we experience this love, there is a temptation at times to become hostile to our earlier understandings, feeling embarrassed that we were so "simple" or "naive," or "brainwashed" or whatever terms arise when we haven't come to terms with our own story. These past understandings aren't to be denied or dismissed; they're to be embraced. Those experiences belong. Love demands that they belong. That's where we were at that point in our life and God met us there. Those moments were necessary for us to arrive here, at this place at this time, as we are. Love frees us to embrace all of our history, the history in which all things are being made new. — Rob Bell

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in Basic Color Terms demonstrate exhaustively and empirically, the very simple thesis that anywhere in the world, as a language develops and acquires names for color, the colors always enter in the same order. The most primitive are black and white. Then red. Then either green or yellow. — Alexander Theroux

From a simple, mammal perspective, you think you're going to make friends through the movie. You think, "Oh, this kind of humor that I play with will bring people that have a similar kind of humor. I'll make new friends," or something. You don't even think in terms of audience or of money. — Gaspar Noe

Despite its simple and humble design, Zik is certainly today one of our most successful products in terms of intuitive ergonomics. — Philippe Starck

But she grasped points quickly and put them in simple terms. There is a type of mind, like Willi's, that can only accept ideas if they are put in the language he would use himself. — Doris Lessing

It was the first time that ever George had sat down on equal terms at any white man's table; and he sat down, at first, with some constraint, and awkwardness; but they all exhaled and went off like fog, in the genial morning rays of this simple overflowing kindness.
This indeed, was a home, - home, -a word that George had never yet known a meaning for; and a belief in God, and trust in His providence, began to encircle his heart, as, with a golden cloud of protection and confidence, dark, misanthropic, pining, atheistic doubts, and fierce despair, melted away before the light of a living Gospel, breathed in living faces, preached by a thousand unconscious acts of love and good-will, which, like the cup of cold water given in the name of a disciple, shall never lose their reward. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

Having a self, even a simple self, allows you to look into the world and put a mark over what is more important and less important. It's a way of classifying the world in terms of your own needs. — Antonio Damasio

We marched him to the turfy shack where he lived with his parents and while the youth sulked Petronius Longus put the whole moral issue in succinct terms to them: Ollia's father was a legionary veteran who had served in Egypt and Syria for over twenty years until he left with double pay, three medals, and a diploma that made Ollia legitimate; he now ran a boxers' training school where he was famous for his high-minded attitude and his fighters were notorious for their loyalty to him ... The old fisherman was a toothless, hapless, faithless cove you would not trust too near you with a filleting knife, but whether from fear or simple cunning he co-operated eagerly. The lad agreed to marry the girl and since Silvia would never abandon Ollia here, we decided that the fisherboy had to come back with us to Rome. His relations looked impressed by this result. We accepted it as the best we could achieve. — Lindsey Davis

Our job in physics is to see things simply, to understand a great many complicated phenomena in a unified way, in terms of a few simple principles. — Steven Weinberg

Irene didn't dignify his question with an answer. Besides, he'd learn better. A Librarian's mission to seek out books for the Library developed, after a few years, into an urge to find out everything that was going on around one. It wasn't even a personal curiosity. It was a simple, impersonal, uncontrollable need to know. One came to terms with it. She lifted off the Canopic jar's stylized jackal-head lid. 'There's something in here,' she reported. — Genevieve Cogman

Despite the fact that in America we incarcerate more juveniles for life terms than in any other country in the world, the truth is that the vast majority of youth offenders will one day be released. The question is simple and stark. Do we want to help them change or do we want to help them become even more violent and dangerous? — Ayelet Waldman

They use the simple back and forth, the same, old rhythm
That a baby can pick up, and join, right with 'em.
But their rhymes are pathetic, they think they copacetic
Using nursery terms, at least not poetic ... — Kool Keith

Faith is a device of self-delusion, a sleight of hand done with words and emotions founded on any irrational notion that can be dreamed up. Faith is the attempt to coerce truth to surrender to whim. In simple terms, it is trying to breath life into a lie by trying to outshine reality with the beauty of wishes. Faith is the refuge of fools, the ignorant, and the deluded,not of thinking rational people. — Terry Goodkind

Among the many problems with taking the Bible literally is it reduces the most mysterious and complex of realities to simple - even simplistic - terms. Yes, scripture speaks of fire and damnation and eternal bliss, but the Bible is the product of human hands and hearts, and much of the imagery is allegorical, not meteorological. — Jon Meacham

To imagine writing as absence seems to be a simple repetition, in transcendental terms, of both the religious principle of the inalterable and yet never fulfilled tradition, and the aesthetic principle of the work's survival, its perpetuation beyond the author's death, and it enigmatic excess in relation to him. — Michel Foucault

In simple straightforward terms Dan, you might say that he structured the material in terms of the ongoing situation to tangibilitate the utilization potential of this one to one instructional medium in such a meaningful learning experience that these
kids won't forget it for a hell of a long time, how's that Whiteback. — William Gaddis

English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us. — Willard Van Orman Quine

In practical terms the South Pointing Chariot was a simple direction finder. It could have been made to point in any direction - north, south, east or west. — Kit Williams

There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.' — Alain De Botton

A nationwide study published by the USDA in 1996 found that [ ... ] 78.6 percent of the ground beef contained microbes that are spread primarily by fecal matter. The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating hamburger meat makes you sick: There is shit in the meat. — Eric Schlosser

Although each egg cell produced by a woman carries a single X chromosome, the sperm cells produced by a man carry either an X or a Y. This means, in very simple terms, that the sperm cell determines a baby's sex. — Kenneth R. Miller

I like human stories. I like stories about situations we can relate to. I like movies like 'Ordinary People' or 'Terms of Endearment.' Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, boyfriends, girlfriends. The stories to me that are worth telling are almost simple ones, but very relatable. — Chris Evans

Rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power. — Albert Camus

'Think simple' as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles. — Frank Lloyd Wright

These short stories are vast structures existing mostly in the subconscious of our cultural history. They will live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That's because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs. A good short story asks a question that can't be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything. — Walter Mosley

It is not productive to see things in simple black and white, and talk in either anti-nuclear or pro-nuclear terms. — Yoshihiko Noda

Forests ... are in fact the world's air-conditioning system-the very lungs of the planet-and help to store the largest body of freshwater on the planet ... essential to produce food for our planet's growing population. The rainforests of the world also provide the livelihoods of more than a billion of the poorest people on this Earth ... In simple terms, the rainforests, which encircle the world, are our very life-support system-and we are on the verge of switching it off. — Prince Charles

Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography. — Anita Brookner

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. — Mark Zuckerberg

We really began to think in different ways about our business in terms of climbing this mountain and it became very clear very quickly this was the smart thing to do. Not only did we start to generate answers for those customers, they embraced us for what we were trying to do. The goodwill in the market place has just been stunning. The rest of the business case is pretty simple. I cost it down not up. — Ray Anderson

The core of the evolution controversy can thus be phrased in simple terms: Did mind create matter? Or did matter give rise to mind? According to a theistic worldview, mind is primary. It is the fundamental creative force in the universe (whether God created the world quickly by fiat or slowly by a gradual process). Darwin reversed things. According to his theory, matter is the primary creative force, and mind emerged only very late in evolutionary history.10 — Nancy Pearcey

For simple black holes, which do not rotate and have no electric charge, the values of the temperature and entropy can be expressed very simply. The area of the horizon of a simple black hole is proportional to the square of its mass, in Planck units. The entropy S is proportional to this quantity. In terms of Planck units, we have the simple formula S = .25 A / h G. Where A is the area of the horizon, and G is the gravitational constant. — Lee Smolin

I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say: let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together.
But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken. — Catherynne M Valente

An idea is a light turned on in a man's soul. Comic-strip artists are in the habit of representing it by means of a light bulb flashing on, above the head of a character who has suddenly grasped an idea. In simple, primitive terms, this is an appropriate symbol. — Ayn Rand

Before I had kids, I thought you should never lie to a kid. But now I've had them, I realize you almost lie to them by definition, because if you're trying to summarize something for your 1-year-old, you put it in very simple terms. You only gradually complicate the explanation as they get older. — Emma Donoghue

The statesman must think in terms of the national interest, conceived as power among other powers. The popular mind, unaware of the fine distinctions of the statesman's thinking, reasons more often than not in the simple moralistic and legalistic terms of absolute good and absolute evil. — Hans Morgenthau

I wish I could help everyone to understand this one simple fact: we believe in God because of things we know with our heart and mind, not because of things we do not know. Our spiritual experiences are sometimes too sacred to explain in worldly terms, but that doesn't mean they are not real. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

In simple terms, we are aligning our business today with the way we believe future systems are going to be designed, acquired and maintained. — Phil Condit

The aim of mathematics is to explain as much as possible in simple terms. — Michael Atiyah

I think one of the major misconceptions about me is that I live my life the way people think I lead my life, with hot and cold drinks running everywhere and a party all the time. They think of my life in terms of certain excesses that don't really exist. Things are actually fairly simple. — George Clooney

In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms."
I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently.
"I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms. — Haruki Murakami

If you wanted to create jobs in a way that has minimal effect on the deficit but has government action, the two best things you could do are the infrastructure bank and a simple SBA-like loan guarantee for all building retrofits, where the contractor or the energy-service company guarantees the savings. So that allows the bank to loan money to let a school or a college or a hospital or a museum or a commercial building unencumbered by debt to loan it on terms that are longer, so you can pay it back only from your utility savings. You could create a million jobs doing that. — William J. Clinton

Until I saw my drawings replayed on the iPad, I'd never seen myself draw. Someone watching me would be concentrating on the exact moment, but I'd always be thinking a little bit ahead. That's especially so in a drawing where you are limiting yourself, a line drawing for example. When you are doing them you are very tense, because you have to reduce everything to such simple terms. — David Hockney

My point is, or should be, simple: history happened. The object is not to undo it, distort it, or to make it fit our present political attitudes. The object of history, which each generation properly interprets anew, is to understand what happened and why. A multicultural Canada can and should look at its past with fresh eyes. It should, for example, study how the Ukrainians came to Canada, how they were treated, how they lived, sometimes suffered, ultimately prospered, and became Canadians. What historians should not do is to recreate history to make it serve present purposes. They should not obscure or reshape events to make them fit political agendas. They should not declare whole areas of the past off-limits because they can only be presented in politically unfashionable terms any more than they should fail to draw object lessons from a past that was frequently less than pleasant and less than honourable. Because the past was not perfect, it must not be made perfect today. — J.L. Granatstein

Some believe that we will eventually sink back to the more simple-minded creatures which we evolved out of and the planet will bring another mind forward." "Isn't that the opposite of evolution?" "Only from a single-species perspective. A planet's life is paramount. It is such a fragile rare event, it should be treasured and nurtured for the potential it brings forth. If that means abdicating our physical dominance for our successors, then that is what we will accept. Such a time is a long way in our future. In terms of evolution, we have only just begun such a journey. — Peter F. Hamilton

Object-oriented languages use the paradigm of classes. In simplest terms, a class includes both data and the functions to operate on that data. You can create an instance of a class, also called an object, which will have all the data members and functionality of its class. Because of this, you can think of a class as being like a template, with each object being a specific instance of a particular type of class. For example, suppose you have a very simple class called Person, which has three fields (a data member is called a field in Java) and one method (a function is called a method in Java). The following code illustrates creating a simple class. For example, the first thing inside the beginning brace ({) is a constructor, a special kind of method that creates an instance of a class and sets its fields with their initial values. — Suresh Basandra

In simple terms, I realised that food is the most fundamental need for a person. In difficult economic times, people's priorities change, and they might be willing to do something that secures for them the lowest possible weekly food bill. — Stelios Haji-Ioannou

Mr Warboys, without putting himself to the trouble of deciding which of the more ferocious animals his friend resembled, stated the matter in simple, and courageously frank terms. "Y"know, old fellow," he once told Martin,"if you had a tail, damme if you wouldn't lash it! — Georgette Heyer

The reason women don't vote for Republicans is not that they haven't had the impact of Republican policies spelled out in simple enough terms for them. It's because they understand Republican policies perfectly well. Women vote against Republicans because they know the impact Republican policies have on their lives. — Renee Ellmers

The author of IRR, who worshipped the King, said he had the valor of Hector, the magnanimity of Achilles, the liberality of Titus, the eloquence of Nestor, and the prudence of Ulysses; that he was the equal of Alexander and not inferior to Roland. But later historians tend to picture him rather as a remorseless, kindless villain. He was probably not a pleasant or a lovable character; none of the Plantagenets were. But a great soldier and a great commander he certainly was. He possessed that one quality without which nothing else in a commander counts: the determination to win. To this everything else - mercy, moderation, tact - was sacrificed. The avarice that so horrifies his critics was not simple greed: it was a quartermaster's greed for his army. His massacre of the prisoners was not simple cruelty, but a deliberate reminder to Saladin to keep faith with the terms agreed to, which that great opponent understood and respected. — Barbara W. Tuchman

I was fortunate enough to be raised in a, in a very romantic time in terms of music, and the music itself simple reflected the much more romantic time. — Hugh Hefner

As we live and as we are, Simplicity - with a capital "S" - is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means. — Frank Lloyd Wright

And, if you believe, in very simple terms, that people mean you well, and will treat you kindly, they will. And, if you believe that the world is against you, then so it will be in your experience. And, if you believe that you will begin to deteriorate at age 22, then so you shall. — Jane Roberts

Therefore a simple and poor society can exist as a democracy on a basis of sheer individualism. But a rich and complex industrial society cannot so exist; for some individuals, and especially those artificial individuals called corporations, become so very big that the ordinary individual is utterly dwarfed beside them, and cannot deal with them on terms of equality. It therefore becomes necessary for these ordinary individuals to combine in their turn, first in order to act in their collective capacity through that biggest of all combinations called the Government, and second, to act, also in their own self-defense, through private combinations, such as farmers' associations and trade unions. — Theodore Roosevelt

I propose a simple account of how we generate intuitive opinions on complex matters. If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution. I also adopt the following terms: — Daniel Kahneman

By mental cultivation I mean a disciplined application of mind that involves deepening our familiarity with a chosen object or theme. Here I am thinking of the Sanskrit term bhavana, which connotes "cultivation," and whose Tibetan equivalent, gom, has the connotation of "familiarization." These two terms, often translated into English as meditation, refer to a whole range of mental practices and not just, as many suppose, to simple methods of relaxation. The original terms imply a process of cultivating familiarity with something, whether it is a habit, a way of seeing, or a way of being. — Dalai Lama XIV

While the changes that are necessary are actually simple, they're painful, and require courage and sacrifice. Living standards will decline in real terms. Citizens will have to save more and consume less. Working lives with lengthen. For many, retirement will be revert to being a luxury. Taxes and charges for government services will rise to match the cost of providing them. There has to be greater emphasis on the real economy - the creation and sale of goods and services. Financial institutions need to return to their actual role of supporting economic activity. — Satyajit Das

To be compassionate is not a joke. It's not that simple. One has to discover a certain bigness in oneself. That bigness should be centered on oneself, not in terms of money, not in terms of power you wield, not in terms of any status that you can command in the society, but it should be centered on oneself. — Dayananda Saraswati

My contacts with the film industry can be described in very simple terms: The industry does not really need me, and I do not really need the industry. — Werner Herzog

At Wal-Mart, if you couldn't explain an idea or a concept in simple terms on one page of paper Sam Walton considered the new idea too complicated to implement. — Michael Bergdahl

Edinolochniks [individual peasant farmers] are whitewashing their khatas [simple Ukrainian houses]. They look at us with a challenge in their eyes: 'It's Easter.' The implication behind this strange remark in autumn was the hint that they were celebrating the arrival of the most joyful moment of the year. Some historians have suggested that the Germans, with black crosses on their vehicles, were seen as bringing Christian liberation to a population oppressed by Soviet atheism. Many Ukrainians did welcome the Germans with bread and salt, and many Ukrainian girls consorted cheerfully with German soldiers. It is hard to gauge the scale of this phenomenon in statistical terms, but it is significant that the Abwehr, the Germany Army intelligence department, recommended that an army of a million Ukrainians should be raised to fight the Red Army. This was firmly rejected by Hitler who was horrified at the suggestion of Slavs fighting in Wehrmacht uniform. — Vasily Grossman

Perhaps we see equations as simple because they are easily expressed in terms of mathematical notation already invented at an earlier stage of development of the science, and thus what appears to us as elegance of description really reflects the interconnectedness of Nature's laws at different levels. — Murray Gell-Mann

In very simple terms, I want you to want to please me. — E.L. James

What exactly was the role of the U.S. government in the coup that overthrew Ngo Dinh Diem?" Trumbull stared for a moment at Foley's rigid back. Then he said to Patchen, "Tell him." "I think you already know, Paul," Patchen said. "In simple terms, we countenanced it. We knew it was being planned. We offered advice. We provided support. We encouraged the plot. We welcomed the results. — Charles McCarry

in simple terms, what you perceive as real, is actually a neurological reconstruction or simulation of the actual real thing. It's not as simple as saying, we see as it is. Actually we do not ever see as it is. — Abhijit Naskar