Simplicity From Walden Quotes

1. "My ideals told me that men and women could both go out to work and be truly equal. My children told me something more complicated, something I really didn't want to hear. Their need for me was like the need for water or light: it had a devastating simplicity to it."
Author: Allison Pearson

2. "His (Grant's) face has three expressions: deep thought, extreme determination, and great simplicity and calmness."
Author: Amanda Foreman

3. "These values are signposts toward another way of living: simplicity of living, as much as possible, to retain a true awareness of life; balance of physical, intellectual, and spiritual life; work without pressure; space for significance and beauty; time for solitude and sharing; closeness to nature to strengthen understanding and faith in the intermittency of life."
Author: Anne Morrow Lindbergh

4. "And yes, there's a simplicity to writing books because you're not a member of a team, so you make all the decisions yourself instead of deferring to a committee."
Author: Bernard Cornwell

5. "Vivid simplicity is the articulation, the nature of genius. Wisdom is greater than intelligence; intelligence is greater than philosobabble."
Author: Criss Jami

6. "A logical analysis of reflexive usages in French shows, however, that this simplicity is an illusion and that, so far from helping the foreigner, it is more calculated to bother him."
Author: Edward Sapir

7. "Science attempts to find logic and simplicity in nature. Mathematics attempts to establish order and simplicity in human thought."
Author: Edward Teller

8. "A knowledge of the truth depends not so much upon strength of intellect as upon pureness of purpose, the simplicity of an earnest, dependent faith."
Author: Ellen G. White

9. "For simplicity one can think of the + class as having one extra base at some point or other in the genetic message and the - class as having one too few."
Author: Francis Crick

10. "Kessler depicts his developing intimacy with a handful of dairy goats and offers an enviable glimpse of the pastoral good life. Yet he also cautions, "Wherever the notion of paradise exists, so does the idea that it was lost. Paradise is always in the past." The title Goat Song is a literal rendering of the Greek word traghoudhia, tragedy. Reading it, I was reminded of Leo Marx's analysis of Thoreau's Walden. In The Machine in the Garden, Marx names Thoreau a tragic, if complex pastoralist. After failing to make an agrarian living raising beans for commercial trade (although his intent was always more allegorical than pecuniary), Thoreau ends Walden by replacing the pastoral idea where it originated: in literature. Paradise, Marx concludes, is not ultimately to be found at Walden Pond; it is to be found in the pages of Walden."
Author: Heather Paxson

11. "All my own perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded upon Our Lady."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

12. "In these days Melissa's absorbed and provoking gentleness had all the qualities of a rediscovered youth. Her long uncertain fingers - I used to feel them moving over my face when she thought I slept, as if to memorize the happiness we had shared. In her there was a pliancy, a resilience which was Oriental - a passion to serve. My shabby clothes - the way she picked up a dirty shirt seemed to engulf it with an overflowing solicitude; in the morning I found my razor beautifully cleaned and even the toothpaste laid upon the brush in readiness. Her care for me was a goad, provoking me to give my life some sort of shape and style that might match the simplicity of hers. Of her experiences in love she would never speak, turning from them with a weariness and distaste which suggested that they had been born of necessity rather than desire. She paid me the comlpiment of saying: "For the first time I am not afraid to be light-headed or foolish with a man"."
Author: Lawrence Durrell

13. "He murmured things that shocked her, expressing himself not in flowery phrases, but with the raw simplicity of a man whose lust for her knew no limits. "I have no self-control where you're concerned. Every minute that I'm not with you, all I can think about is being inside you. I hate everything that keeps you separate from me."
Author: Lisa Kleypas

14. "It is no more natural and no less conventional to shout in anger or to kiss in love than to call a table 'a table'. Feelings and passional conduct are invented like words. Even those which like paternity seem to be part and parcel of the human make-up are in reality institutions. It is impossible to superimpose on man a lower layer of behavior which one chooses to call 'natural' followed by a manufactured cultural or spiritual world. Everything is both manufactured and natural in man as it were in the sense that there is not a word, not a form of behavior which does not owe something to purely biological being and which at the same time does not elude the simplicity of animal life and cause forms of vital behavior to deviate from their pre-ordained direction through a sort of leakage and through a genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man."
Author: Maurice Merleau Ponty

15. "How then should I love God?' You should love God non-mentally, that is to say the soul should become non-mental and stripped of her mental images. For as long as your soul is mental, she will possess images. As long as she has images, she will possess intermediaries, and as long as she has intermediaries, she will not have unity or simplicity. As long as she lacks simplicity, she does not truly love God, for true love depends upon simplicity . . . Indeed, you must love him as he is One, pure, simple and transparent, far from all duality. And we should eternally sink into this One, thus passing from something into nothing. So help us God. Amen."
Author: Meister Eckhart

16. "Part of the blame lies with intellectuals who are unable or unwilling to convey their ideas in terms that will play down to the cafe. But anyone who sits in that cafe and dismisses complexity by reveling in their own simplicity is no less pretentious."
Author: Michael Perry

17. "I am glad I am rooted to the world of genuineness and simplicity It couldn't be taught in school or college it comes from my very special mum."
Author: Nigar Siddiqui

18. "Our manly ways and stern simplicity wreak much confusion to the enemy's councils. For they are men yet garb themselves as women, wearing wigs and finery and lace. And for this offense if it be God's will we will come upon them in the night, from the rear, and penetrate their degenerate bodies with our holy truth. For we are manly saints and possess the full swelling hardness of our faith, which gushes forevermore from Christ's unyielding root."
Author: Oliver Cromwell

19. "A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

20. "[Thoreau's] famous night in jail took place about halfway through his stay in the cabin on Emerson's woodlot at Walden Pond. His two-year stint in the small cabin he built himself is often portrayed as a monastic retreat from the world of human affairs into the world of nautre, though he went back to town to eat with and talk to friends and family and to pick up money doing odd jobs that didn't fit into Walden's narrative. He went to jail both because the town jailer ran into him while he was getting his shoe mended and because he felt passionately enough about national affairs to refuse to pay his tax. To be in the woods was not to be out of society or politics."
Author: Rebecca Solnit

21. "In simplicity there is truth."
Author: River Phoenix

22. "Yet I had not been many days shut up with them before I began to be ashamed of my first judgment, when I had drawn away from them at the Ferry pier, as though they had been unclean beasts. No class of man is altogether bad, but each has its own faults and virtues; and these shipmates of mine were no exception to the rule. Rough they were, sure enough; and bad, I suppose; but they had many virtues. They were kind when it occurred to them, simple even beyond the simplicity of a country lad like me, and had some glimmerings of honesty."
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

23. "The greatest mathematics has the simplicity and inevitableness of supreme poetry and music, standing on the borderland of all that is wonderful in Science, and all that is beautiful in Art."
Author: Robert Turnbull

24. "The greatest step towards a life of simplicity is to learn to let go."
Author: Steve Maraboli

25. "Life Is ‘Simple' By Nature...The deeper you try to study, the more you complicate it.Just believe in it's simplicity & it shall show you it is far too Simple actually!"
Author: Sujit Lalwani

26. "We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain make us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humour. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous...We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty..."
Author: Toni Morrison

27. "Our everyday lives are filled with complex decisions. We long for simplicity and ordinariness."
Author: Ursus Wehrli

28. "Jobs's intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions. If something engaged him- the user interface for the original Macintosh, the design of the iPod and iPhone, getting music companies into the iTunes Store-he was relentless. But if he did not want to deal with something - a legal annoyance, a business issue, his cancer diagnosis, a family tug- he would resolutely ignore it. That focus allowed him to say no. He got Apple back on track by cutting all except a few core products. He made devices simpler by eliminating buttons, software simpler by eliminating features, and interfaces simpler by eliminating options. He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training. It honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism."
Author: Walter Isaacson

Simplicity From Walden Quotes Pictures