Simplest Things Quotes & Sayings

The plain wooden toothpick, it may be argued, is among the simplest of manufactured things. It consists of a single part, made of a single material, intended for a single purpose-from which it gets its simple name. It is also among the most convenient and ready of things. It can be used directly out of the box-there being no instructions to read, no parts to assemble, no priming or booting required, and no maintenance expected. When it has served its purpose, it is simply discarded. — Henry Petroski

The grandest and simplest things contain worlds within worlds. Seeing them is a matter of the right point of view, and your painter's eye is the special portal to such sights. — Richard Schmid

We also know that the brain can handle only a limited amount of information at a time; at its simplest, we can think of stress as information overload, so when there's too much happening, the brain starts to triage, prioritizing, simplifying, and even plain old ignoring some things. — Emily Nagoski

I don't know what rituals my kids will carry into adulthood, whether they'll grow up attached to homemade pizza on Friday nights, or the scent of peppers roasting over a fire, or what. I do know that flavors work their own ways under the skin, into the heart of longing. Where my kids are concerned I find myself hoping for the simplest things: that if someday they crave orchards where their kids can climb into the branches and steal apples, the world will have trees enough with arms to receive them. — Barbara Kingsolver

Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money. — Ernest Hemingway,

The starting point of great success in your life begins, in the simplest terms, when you discipline yourself to think and talk about only the things you want and refuse to think and talk about anything you don't want. — Brian Tracy

Occam's Razor. My father had often repeated that one to me. Occam's Razor states the following: "Other things being equal, a simpler explanation is better than a more complex one." Put more succinctly, the simplest answer was usually the best one. So — Harlan Coben

Seek the simplest in all things, in food, clothing, without being ashamed of poverty. For a great part of the world lives in poverty. Do not say, "I am the son of a rich man. It is shameful for me to be in poverty." Christ, your Heavenly Father, Who gave birth to you in the baptistery, is not in worldly riches. Rather he walked in poverty and had nowhere to lay His head. — Gennadius Of Constantinople

It doesn't take much to make me happy, but the simplest things are sometimes the hardest to get. But when if finally arrives, heaven help those who try to take it away from me. — Jaime Reed

Children are happy because they have the power of finding happiness in the simplest things. — Debasish Mridha

The simplest things in life are what makes us happy eventually. A warm and comfy home, being loved, and knowing that somebody can't live without you — Ika Natassa

Dogs are often happier than men simply because the simplest things are the greatest things for them! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I relax by looking at things and reading about things. Even the simplest thing can reveal a great deal about the world around us. It relaxes me greatly to sit back with my feet up and look around my study at the everyday things that surround me. — Henry Petroski

When a warrior has put an end to his routines, when he doesn't care anymore whether he has company or is alone, because he has heard the silent whisper of the spirit; then you can say that, truly, he has died. From that point on, even the simplest things in life become extraordinary for him. — Carlos Castaneda

Lately I had been finding it hard to understand the simplest things people said to me, as if what they were speaking in were a form of language I did not recognise; I would know the words but could not assemble them into sense. — John Banville

Tell me, McFadden, what do you think of our beloved Mr. Chamberlain? Mac didn't care for such direct questions. All his adult life had been spent in the mentality of the gulag, never openly complaining, always seeming to conform, never risking a row. Perhaps that's why he had agreed to marry, not so much to avoid disappointing the lady but more because it was the simplest way to fit into the flow of things. — Michael Dobbs

You'd think walking should be the simplest thing," she said at last. "Just a question of putting one foot in front of the other. But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are." She wet her lower lip with — Rachel Joyce

Somehow, you need to cling to your optimism. Always look for the silver lining. Always look for the best in people. Try to see things through the eyes of a child. See the wonder in the simplest things. Never stop dreaming. Believe anything is possible. — Richie Sambora

Becoming a father, I think it inevitably changes your perspective of life. I don't get nearly enough sleep. And the simplest things in life are completely satisfying. I find you don't have to do as much, like you don't go on as many outings. — Hugh Jackman

Say the very simplest and most obvious things, say them as often as possible, and put into the saying all the screaming passion which one human voice can carry -- that was Adolf Hitler's technique. No matter whether it was true or not -- for (Hitler) meant literally his maxim that the bigger the falsehood, the easier to get it believed; people would say you wouldn't dare make up a thing like that. Imagine the worst possible about your enemies and then swear that you knew it, you had seed it, it was God's truth and you were ready to stake your life upon it -- shout this, bellow this, over and over, day after day, night after night...when ten million join in it becomes history. — Upton Sinclair

That's why I loved being with you. We could do the simplest things, like toss starfish into the ocean and share a burger and talk and even then I knew that I was fortunate. Because you were the first guy who wasn't constantly trying to impress me. You accepted who you were, but more than that, you accepted me for me. And nothing else mattered
not my family or your family or anyone else in the world. It was just us. — Nicholas Sparks

It is the simplest things in life that hold the most wonder; the color of the sea, the sand between your toes, the laughter of a child. — Goldie Hawn

Seventh letter : Life's simplest pleasures are life's greatest joys

Most people dont discover whats most important in life untill they are too old to do anything about it. They spend many of their best years pursuing things that matter little in the end. While society invites us to fill our with material objects, the best part of us knows that the more basic pleasures are the ones that enriches and sustain us. No matter how easy or hard our conditions, we all have wealth of simple blessings around us - waiting to be continued. As we do our happiness grows. Our gratitude expands. And each day becomes a breathtaking gift. — Robin S. Sharma

I may not know the weight of those things, but I could feel the weight of that one, so I kept it to myself. You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it's why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible. — Nick Hornby

One of the simplest things about all facts of life is that to get where you want to go, you must keep on keeping on. — Norman Vincent Peale

I know the secret of life, interestingly [laughs]: it's pleasure in simple things. I've always had this since I started growing up; I realised why I was mostly happy. It's because I took pleasure in the simplest, little things. — Anonymous

The simplest things are often the truest. — Richard Bach

The public, obviously, they takes things in a very simplest fashion and so they should. That's why we have such wonderful television. — David Bowie

The lessons she'd been forced to learn were dry spare things, the facts without the sense of them, given in the simplest of language, as if words might disguise the truth or (worse) bring it to life. — Robin McKinley

One thing we might do is to try day by day to grasp something which is the simplest and yet the hardest thing for any of us to grasp: that the gospel is true; that growth in the Christian life is simply growth in seeing that the gospel is true; that Jesus Christ is the preeminent reality of all things. — John Webster

Prayer is the easiest and hardest of all things; the simplest and the sublimest; the weakest and the most powerful; its results lie outside the range of human possibilities-they are limited only by the omnipotence of God. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Even the simplest things, I'm guilty of making really bad decisions a lot of the time. — Michelle Williams

The simplest things give me ideas. — Joan Miro

Magnus had been alive hundreds of years himself, and yet the simplest things could turn a day into a jewel, and a succession of days into a glittering chain that went on and on. Here was the simplest thing: a pretty girl liked him, and the day shone. — Cassandra Clare

Even the simplest tools can empower people to do great things. — Biz Stone

This is because secrets are terrible things.
Even the simplest ones — Karen Foxlee

Think of that person you knew when you were a kid, who you always thought you could have loved completely and forever.Well, you could have. It's the truth, and it's the saddest and simplest thing. There isn't just one person for each of us in the world. There aren't many, but there are always a few people we could have made it with, that maybe we still want to make it with, that press themselves so close to our hearts they leave scars, and then slip through our fingers and disappear from our lives. And it doesn't make a difference if you're thirteen or ninety- eight because some things you feel are real, no matter when. — Abigail Tarttelin

There's not much that doesn't get me stoked. I love what I do and am so passionate about it that I get stoked on the simplest things - watching the sunrise, walking on the beach, going for a run through the forest or along the coast. One of my all time favorite things is surfing amazing waves with my family and best friends. — Sally Fitzgibbons

I was thinking how strange it is that water is one of the best, simplest things on this planet, and still with a simple glass of water you can neutralize so many of the greatest technological advances that we provide. Like with my blackberry, I can get in touch with so many people, but if I dip it in a small glass of water I'm completely disconnected. — Demetri Martin

Continually, a storm blew through our world and it always had, and the only place I knew where this was formulated, the most extreme yet simplest things, was in these holy scriptures. — Karl Ove Knausgard

I love dive bars, old movie theaters, live music and good food. The simplest things in life for me are the most important. — Tanya Fischer

Death, Andre, the prior thought, as he now buckled up his saddlebags for a long journey, and not the sort of death unleashed here, either. Death in the very oldest Catholic sense, as in Saint John's Gospel and the Didache: death of the soul as opposed to the road of life. For there are only two ways, dear Father Andre . . . but did anyone ever actually teach you that? It is only these simplest and plainest things we find so hard, anymore. — Michael Morow

Simple' does not mean 'easy'. I have learned that the things that seem the simplest are often the most powerful of all. — Christie Golden

Mathematicians enjoy thinking about the simplest possible things, and the simplest possible things are imaginary. — Paul Lockhart

Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society. — Questlove

I live by the simplest, perhaps facile command that Jesus ever gave, which is to love God with the whole self and the neighbor as the self, and I find that's entirely consuming. To do those two things leaves me very little time to do much else. — Barbara Brown Taylor

With all things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one. — William Of Ockham

One of the simplest ways to stay happy is letting go of the things that makes you sad. — Daily Dose

I watch her do the simplest things: brushing her hair into a ponytail, feeding the dog, tying Sophie's shoelaces, and I want to tell her what she means to me, but I never actually say the words. After all, to acknowledge Delia as a drug, I'd have to face the fact that one day I might have to go without her and this I can't do. — Jodi Picoult

I love spending time with my friends and family. The simplest things in life give me the most pleasure: cooking a good meal, enjoying my friends. — Cindy Morgan

Experience has shown that science frequently develops most fruitfully once we learn to examine the things that seem the simplest, instead of those that seem the most mysterious. — Marvin Minsky

I have found that some of the simplest things have given me the most pleasure. They didn't cost me a lot of money either. They just worked on my senses. Did you ever pick very large blueberries after a summer rain Walk through a grove of cottonwoods, open like a park, and see the blue sky beyond the shimmering gold of the leaves? Pull on dry woolen socks after you've peeled off the wet ones? Come in out of the subzero and shiver yourself warm in front of a wood fire? The world is full of such things. — Richard Proenneke

Then there are the simple things. The way she fits against my side when we're sitting together. How she can silence my addled thoughts with one look. The sound of my name from her lips. The way she can make a moment, any moment, a thousands times better when she is there. How the simplest pleasures in life become exciting with the promise of sharing the experience with her. — Erik Tomblin

People are stumbling over the simplest things. Take, for instance, that word believeth. You would think that was plain enough for anybody, but all my life I have heard people say, 'I have always believed, and yet I am not saved.' It does not say, 'Whosoever believeth the Bible, or creeds, or even the gospel story,' but it does say, 'Whosoever believeth in him.' What is it to believe in Him? It means to put your soul's confidence in Him, to trust in Him, God's blessed Son. — Henry Allen Ironside

People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing-refusing to participate in activities that make life bad. — Leo Tolstoy

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. — Ernest Hemingway,

Photography makes one conscious of beauty everywhere, even in the simplest things, even in what is often considered commonplace or ugly. Yet nothing is really 'ordinary', for every fragment of the world is crowned with wonder and mystery, and a great and surprising beauty. — Alvin Langdon Coburn

The simplest things in music are the ones that count. The simplest thing are, of course, also the most difficult to achieve and take years of work. — Pablo Casals

Sometimes the simplest things are the most profound. — Carolina Herrera

To me, the simplest things can have the highest value. — Brunello Cucinelli

All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one. — William Of Ockham

I'm sure that if [Walter] could still talk to the living, he would tell us that the simplest things in life can be treasures, and there are no physical or metaphysical limitations on how much we can love-both in this life and beyond. — Amelia Cotter

Sometimes it's the simplest things we should most long for. — C.W. Gortner

And what is simplicity? It is the coming together of the true values of life. Snow is pretty because it has only one color. The sea is pretty because it appears to be a flat plane. The desert is beautiful because it seems to consist only of sand and rocks. However, when we look more closely at each of these things, we discover how profound and complete they are, and recognize their qualities. The simplest things in life are the most extraordinary. Let them reveal themselves. Consider — Paulo Coelho

God uses millions of no-name influencers every day in the simplest selfless acts of service. They are the teachers whose names will never be in the newspaper, pastors who will never author a book, managers who will never be profiled in a magazine, artists whose work is buried in layers of collaboration, writers whose sphere of influence is a few dozen people who read their blogs. But they are the army that makes things happen. To them devotion is its own reward. For them influence is a continual act of giving, nothing more complicated than that. — Mel Lawrenz

A Book of Glass
On the table, a book of glass. In the book only a few pages with no words But scratched in a diamond-point pencil to pieces in diagonal Spirals, light triangles; and a French curve fractures lines to
elisions.

The last pages are simplest. They can be read backwards and
thoroughly. Each page bends a bit like ludicrous plastic. He who wrote it was very ambitious, fed up, and finished. He had been teaching the insides and outsides of things

To children, teaching the art of Rembrandt to them. His two wives were beautiful and Death begins As a beggar beside them. What is an abstract persona? A painter visits but he prefers to look at perfume in vials.

And I see a book in glass - the words go off In wild loops without words. I should Wake and render them! In bed, Mother says each child Will receive the book of etchings, but the book will be
incomplete, after all.
But I will make the book of glass. — David Shapiro

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to bewritten, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things. — Lewis Carroll

Unfortunately, the simplest things - such as thinking for myself, creating my own reality and being whatever the hell I want to be each day of my life - are a sin. To be a good Christian basically means to give up the reigns of your life and let some unseen force do it for you. — Brandon Boyd

The one quality which sets one man apart from another- the key which lifts one to every aspiration while others are caught up in the mire of mediocrity- is not talent, formal education, nor intellectual brightness - it is self-discipline. With self-discipline all things are possible. Without it, even the simplest goal can seem like the impossible dream. — Theodore Roosevelt

It's a matter of reducing the work to its very simplest possible state, eliminating all of the things that lead away from the guts of the work, the thing the work is really about. Anything that's there must build towards its over-all organization and meaning. — Paul Cullen

A man reveals his character even in the simplest things he does. — Jean De La Bruyere

The simplest things that need self-restraint are the most difficult to replicate. — Irving Stone

Showing gratitude is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other. — Randy Pausch

What we're all sort of trying to do in our lives is to make the simplest things work out the best. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Happiness, after all, is found in the simplest of things. — Steve Maraboli

Some of the simplest things in like are the most difficult to imagine. — Lemony Snicket

When you go out hunting wicked spirits, it's the simple things that matter most. The silvered point of your rapier flashing in the dark; the iron filings scattered on the floor; the sealed canisters of best Greek Fire, ready as a last resort ...
But tea bags, brown and fresh and plenty of them, and made (for preference) by Pitkin Brothers of Bond Street, are perhaps the simplest and best of all.
OK, they may not save your life like a sword-tip or an iron circle can, and they haven't the protective power of a sudden wall of fire. But they do provide something just as vital. They help keep you sane. — Jonathan Stroud

I felt how important the simplest things were, like feeling proud, finding something funny, stretching yourself, retreating into yourself. — Banana Yoshimoto

When we recall Christmas past, we usually find that the simplest things - not the great occasions - give off the greatest glow of happiness. — Bob Hope

Ours is not a dumb species. We have put a man on the moon. We have unlocked the secrets of the human genome. We have discovered how to take stem cells and coax them into becoming brain cells, heart muscle, liver tissue - any organ of the human body that needs repair. These are our miracles, and there are more. Yet we have not yet found a way to do the simplest things: To live in peace. To stop killing each other when we disagree. To distribute that which is good in life freely and fairly. — Neale Donald Walsch

Poetry is an attempt to penetrate the dense reality to find a place where the simplest things look as new as through the eyes of a child. — Czeslaw Milosz

The simplest things in life are the most extraordinary. Let them reveal themselves. — Paulo Coelho

Clean water and access to food are some of the simplest things that we can take for granted each and every day. In places like Africa, these can be some of the hardest resources to attain if you live in a rural area. — Marcus Samuelsson

Sometimes, I find that just the simplest, cleanest things that are intelligently performed are funniest to me. — Kaitlin Olson

You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you. — Nick Hornby

The most difficult thing is what is thought to be the simplest; to really see the things which are before your eyes. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The motto I have penned on my knuckles is that this is the best world we have
because it's the only world we have. It's the simplest math ever. However many terrible, rankling, peeve-inducing things may occur, there are always libraries. And rain-falling-on-sea. And the moon. And love. There is always something to look back on, with satisfaction, or forward to, with joy. There is always a moment where you boggle at the world
at yourself
at the whole, unlikely, precarious business of being alive
and then start laughing — Caitlin Moran

I love God, whoever he is, and I'd really like to get closer to him. I've been thinking about how one of the simplest ways to get close to a woman is to be good to her children. To be kind and gentle and to pay close attention to the things that make them special. To try to see her children the way she sees her children. And how God made us in his image. How he is the mother and father of all of us. So I wonder if that would be the best way to get closer to him too. By being kind and gentle to his children and noticing all of the things that make them special. So many of us spend our time trying to find God in books, but maybe the simplest way to God is directly through the hearts of his children. — Glennon Doyle Melton

A man knows he's in love when he's totally happy just watching his girlfriend do even the simplest things - peeling an apple, combing her hair, fluffing up a bed pillow, laughing. — James Patterson

And everything else will then turn out to be unimportant and inessential except this: father, child, and love. And then, looking at the simplest things, we will all say, Could we have not learned this long ago? Has this not always been embedded in everything that is? — Pope John Paul II

It's the simplest things in your life that help you achieve the greatest BLESSINGS. None of those things cost you, yet they can bring abundant reward. Faith, honesty and good manners will take you places and assist you in obtaining things that money NEVER will. — Carlos Wallace

Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn't get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn't actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are still placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff. These have been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet 350 years later on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity. — Bill Bryson

Mr. Ellison is that unreasonable man that possesses the ostranenie effect-- he has a keen eye to see the simplest things and make them profound, and make simple minded people see deeply into mundane topics- bringing a philosophical charm to even politics.

No man, not even a semi-god lived an entire life without making a mistake and the fact that Mr. Ellison has lived a life so grandiose with such few errors, is a testament and a plaque to the big person he is. — Avra Amar Filion

When you share feelings with someone, or secrets, it adds a layer of complexity to even the simplest things. — Paula Stokes

I know vaudeville isn't supposed to be art. It's supposed to be entertainment, which is different. But I think art ... I think it's making something from nothing, basically. It's taking something as simple as movement, or a few notes, or steps, or words, and putting them all together so that they're bigger than what they ever could have been separate. They're transformed. And just witnessing that transformation changes you. It reaches into your insides and moves things around. It's magic, of a sort.
I never really knew that until I saw your act. But when you walked out on that stage, I knew I was seeing something ... different. Something maybe more amazing than what the professor and Silenus had done. You were making something up there, out of just the simplest elements possible, and seeing it changed something in me. I'd never encountered anything like that. — Robert Jackson Bennett

A person with taste is merely one who can recognize the greatest beauty in the simplest things. — Barbara Taylor Bradford

Real happiness is so simple that most people do not recognize it. They think it comes from doing something on a big scale, from a big fortune, or from some great achievement, when, in fact, it is derived from the simplest, the quietest, the most unpretentious things in the world. — Orison S. Marden

Why was it, she sometimes wondered, that in dreams we can't do the simplest things? Like a crying puppy is standing on some broken glass and you want to pick it up and brush the shards off its pads but you can't because you're balancing a ball on your head. Or you're driving and there's this old guy on crutches and you go, to Mr. Feder, your Driver's Ed teacher, Should I swerve? And he's like, Uh, probably. But then you hear this big clunk and Feder makes a negative mark in his book. — George Saunders

My inspiration is always love and history, and my passion to a fault is craftsmanship and responsibility. Those are the simplest things. It goes beyond jewelry. It's every part of my life. — Waris Ahluwalia