Simplicity has a unique power to bring clarity, peace, and focus to our lives. Throughout history, many thinkers, writers, and leaders have shared their insights on the beauty and strength found in keeping things simple. In this collection, you'll find 118 carefully selected quotes that celebrate simplicity in its many forms—whether in thought, lifestyle, or creativity. Let these words inspire you to embrace a simpler, more meaningful way of living.
1. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” - Clare Boothe Luce
2. “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” - Henry David Thoreau
3. “As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.” - Henry David Thoreau
4. “Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.” - Lin Yutang
5. “Like all magnificent things, it's very simple.” - Natalie Babbitt
6. “Through the ingenuousness of her age beamed an ardent mind, a mind not of the women but of the poet; she did not please, she intoxicated.” - Alexandre Dumas
7. “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” - E.F. Schumacher
8. “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.” - Albert Einstein
9. “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.” - John Maeda
10. “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” - Confucius
11. “Manifest plainness,Embrace simplicity,Reduce selfishness,Have few desires.” - Lao Tzu
12. “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” - Jack Kerouac
13. “If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.” - Albert Einstein
14. “Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.” - Langston Hughes
15. “There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.” - Leo Tolstoy
16. “A child of five could understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.” - Groucho Marx
17. “It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.” - Bruce Lee
18. “I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it.” - Henry James
19. “What's really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer. ” - William Albert Allard
20. “We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to customers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce that designs that assemble long lists of features.” - Douglas Crockford
21. “We two make banquets of the plainest fareIn every cup we find the thrill of pleasure... For us life always moves with lilting measureWe two, we two, we make our world, our pleasure” - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
22. “Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.” - Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
23. “The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.” - colum mccann
24. “Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
25. “Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury - to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best for both the body and the mind.” - Albert Einstein
26. “While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness. We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search for spiritual highs and extraordinary, mystical experiences but in our simple presence in life.” - Brennan Manning
27. “The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.'Said [author:Diogenes|3213618, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king".” - Anthony de Mello
28. “The point of simple living, for me has got to be:A soft place to landA wide margin of errorRoom to breatheLots of places to find baseline happiness in each and every day” - Leo Babauta
29. “The greatest step towards a life of simplicity is to learn to let go.” - Steve Maraboli
30. “Free yourself from the complexities of your life! A life of simplicity and happiness awaits you.” - Steve Maraboli
31. “Simplify your life. You don't grow spiritual, you shrink spiritual.” - Steve Maraboli
32. “Because . . . most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don't have any of that. There's nothing between you and despair, and you don't seem a very desperate person.' 'Too stupid.' 'You're not stupid. So why don't you ever put your head in the oven?' 'I don't know. There's always a new Nirvana album to look forward to, or something happening in NYPD Blue to make you want to watch the next episode.' 'Exactly.' 'That's the point? NYPD Blue? Jesus.' It was worse than he thought. 'No, no. The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point. I don't know if you even realize it, but on the quiet you don't think life's too bad. You love things. Telly. Music. Food.” - Nick Hornby
33. “People who pride themselves on their "complexity" and deride others for being "simplistic" should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.” - Thomas Sowell
34. “Modern civilisation is complicated and artificial. Simple folk live in a world of love and peace. Let no one hate another or harm another.” - Sivananda
35. “You can never stay angry too long in the bush though. At least, that's what I think. It's not that it's soothing or restful, because it's not. What it does for me is get inside my body, inside my blood, and take me over. I don't know that I can describe it any better than that. It takes me over and I become part of it and it becomes part of me and I'm not very important, or at least no more important than a tree or a rock or a spider abseiling down a long thread of cobweb. As I wandered around, on that hot afternoon, I didn't notice anything too amazing or beautiful or mindbogglingly spectacular. I can't actually remember noticing anything out of the ordinary: just the grey-green rocks and the olive-green leaves and the reddish soil with its teeming ants. The tattered ribbons of paperbark, the crackly dry cicada shell, the smooth furrow left in the dust by a passing snake. That's all there ever is really, most of the time. No rainforest with tropical butterflies, no palm trees or Californian redwoods, no leopards or iguanas or panda bears.Just the bush.” - John Marsden
36. “Ask a true scientist a very profound question on his science, and he will besilent. Ask a true religious person a very simple question on his religion, and he will be frenzied.” - Kedar Joshi
37. “It was a simple thing. All terror is a simplicity. ("Interval In Sunlight")” - Ray Bradbury
38. “I am not a genius, I am just curious. I ask many questions. and when the answer is simple, then God is answering.” - Albert Einstein
39. “I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.” Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. . . . Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. . . . There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity. I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.” - Ernest Hemingway
40. “Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy” - Isaac Newton
41. “When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: "it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks." And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it. When I read this letter of Van Gogh's it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *acedemical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.But the moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.And Van Gogh's little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care. ” - Brenda Ueland
42. “Why did they believe? Because they saw miracles. Things one man took as chance, a man of faith took as a sign. A loved one recovering from disease, a fortunate business deal, a chance meeting with a long lost friend. It wasn't the grand doctrines or the sweeping ideals that seemed to make believers out of men. It was the simple magic in the world around them.” - Brandon Sanderson
43. “The Master said, “A true gentleman is one who has set his heart upon the Way. A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with.”(Analects 4.9)” - Confucius
44. “I long for the simplicity of theatre. I want lessons learned, comeuppances delivered, people sorted out, all before your bladder gets distractingly full. That's what I want. What I know is what we all know, whether we'll admit it or not: every attempt to impose the roundness of a well-made play on reality produces a disaster. Life just isn't so, nor will it be made so.” - John M. Ford
45. “At times his arrogance did resolve itself into simplicity, though it was difficult, especially for strangers, to distinguish these occasions.” - Patrick White
46. “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.” - Henry David Thoreau
47. “I delight to come to my bearings,—not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may,—not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts me;—not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less,—not suppose a case, but take the case that is” - Henry David Thoreau
48. “Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.” - George Eliot
49. “It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town... he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety.” - Henry David Thoreau
50. “A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace.” - Confucius
51. “You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.” - Italo Calvino
52. “Simplicity is ultimately a matter of focus.” - Ann Voskamp
53. “My task is to simplify and then go deeper, making a commitment to what remains. That's what I've been after. To care and polish what remains till it glows and comes alive from loving care.” - Sue Bender
54. “I believe it was the great ogre philosopher Gary who observed that complexity is, generally speaking, an illusion of conscious desire. All things exist in as simple a form as necessity dictates. When a thing is labeled 'complex,' that's just a roundabout way of saying you're not observant enough to understand it.” - A. Lee Martinez
55. “Virtue is under certain circumstances merely an honorable form of stupidity: who could be ill-disposed toward it on that account? And this kind of virtue has not been outlived even today. A kind of sturdy peasant simplicity, which, however, is possible in all classes and can be encountered only with respect and a smile, believes even today that everything is in good hands, namely in the "hands of God"; and when it maintains this proportion with the same modest certainty as it would that two and two make four, we others certainly refrain from contradicting. Why disturb THIS pure foolishness? Why darken it with our worries about man, people, goal, future? And even if we wanted to do it, we could not. They project their own honorable stupidity and goodness into the heart of things (the old God, deus myops, still lives among them!); we others — we read something else into the heart of things: our own enigmatic nature, our contradictions, our deeper, more painful, more mistrustful wisdom.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
56. “Complex things are easy to do. Simplicity's the real challenge.” - Robert James Waller
57. “[Tea-masters] have given emphasis to our natural love of simplicity, and shown us the beauty of humility. In fact, through their teachings tea has entered the life of the people.” - Kakuzo Okakura
58. “We arrive in the rooms tangled up in a web of complexity and confusion. Our lives are unmanageable because our minds are unmanageable.” – p. 134” - Ray A
59. “Learning isn't acquiring knowledge so much as it is trimming information that has already been acquired.” - Criss Jami
60. “What is a genius? A person who demands little to nothing from others, but is often found extremely difficult to have around.” - Criss Jami
61. “Vivid simplicity is the articulation, the nature of genius. Wisdom is greater than intelligence; intelligence is greater than philosobabble.” - Criss Jami
62. “What’s the most difficult thing you can do? Live simply. ‘Cause in order to be self-sufficient, you got to get well near everybody else to work for you.” - M.C. Humphreys
63. “Keep it simple and keep it real. The more basic we see our connection to God and Spirit, the easier it is to feel like you're a part of it.” - Jim Fargiano
64. “History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.” - Jared Diamond
65. “You must speak straight so that your words may go as sunlight into our hearts.” - Cochise ("Like Ironweed")
66. “Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.” - Herbert A. Simon
67. “But I should not have to explain to you how important it is for science and simplicity to coexist. One must not fear to be a little child again, when times of wonder are at hand.” - Jody Lynn Nye
68. “Simplicities are enormously complex. Consider the sentence "I love you".” - Richard O. Moore
69. “I want a simple, ordinary life . . . like humans enjoy.” - Deborah Harkness
70. “To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about.” - Edward Abbey
71. “If you are a warrior, decency means that you are not cheating anybody at all. You are not even about to cheat anybody. There is a sense of straightforwardness and simplicity. With setting-sun vision, or vision based on cowardice, straightforwardness is always a problem. If people have some story or news to tell somebody else, first of all they are either excited or disappointed. Then they begin to figure out how to tell their news. They develop a plan, which leads them completely away from simply telling it. By the time a person hears the news, it is not news at all, but opinion. It becomes a message of some kind, rather than fresh, straightforward news. Decency is the absence of strategy. It is of utmost importance to realize that the warrior’s approach should be simple-minded sometimes, very simple and straightforward. That makes it very beautiful: you having nothing up your sleeve; therefore a sense of genuineness comes through. That is decency.” - CHOGYAM TRUNGPA
72. “Once we got to eating, the idea of happiness returned to me. Not the feeling, the idea. Would a regular girl be happy simply eating a hot meal with a great deal of chew to it? Maybe happiness is a simple thing. Maybe it's as simple as the salty taste of pork, and the vast deal of chewing in it, and how, when the chew is gone, you can still scrape at the bone with your bottom teeth and suck at the marrow.” - Franny Billingsley
73. “These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves -- they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.” - Laura Ingalls Wilder
74. “Then on your tombstone, where you only get a little bit of space to sum up your life, some wax-faced creep chisels a set of meaningless numbers instead of poetry or a secret love or the name of your favorite candy. In the end, all you get is a few words.” - Scott Nicholson
75. “The role of genius is not to complicate the simple, but to simplify the complicated.” - Criss Jami
76. “In simplicity there is truth.” - River Phoenix
77. “One should use common words to say uncommon things” - Arthur Schopenhauer
78. “None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.” - Henry David Thoreau
79. “We aim at simplicity and hope for truth.” - Nelson Goodman
80. “To simplify your life, just think of yourself as a four-year-old child. Try to imagine the way he thinks of reality. If you have to talk to someone about a so-called complicated matter, see how you can simplify it.No matter with whom you are talking, feel that you are a child and that person is also a child. When a childlike quality comes into your life, everything automatically becomes simple.” - Sri Chinmoy
81. “If we have a simple existence, we shall feel how happy and how fortunate we are. There are some people who are of the opinion that simplicity is almost tantamount to stupidity. But simplicity and stupidity are like the North Pole and the South Pole. One can be as simple as a child and, at the same time, one can have boundless knowledge, light and wisdom.” - Sri Chinmoy
82. “Do you want to be happy?Then make your life as soulfully simple As sleeplessly breathing.” - Sri Chinmoy
83. “Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane--in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath--she had probably put herself in unnecessary danger.” - Amor Towles
84. “A simple man will have only what he needs, and he will know the difference between what he needs and what he wants. We feel that whatever we want, we desperately need. But before we possess the world, to our wide surprise we see that the world has already possessed us.” - Sri Chinmoy
85. “Life is indeed terribly complicated—to a man who has lost his principles.” - G.K. Chesterton
86. “Love the moment for its simplicity, it may give or take nothing from you, but in the blinking of an eye it will have change so many things forever.” - Steven Redhead
87. “The greatest truths are the simplest things in the world, simple as your own existence.” - Swami Vivekananda
88. “It's easy to be heavy; hard to be light.” - G.K. Chesterton
89. “We never know how strongly we cling to objects until they are taken away, and he who thinks htat he is attached to nothing, is frequently grandly mistaken, being bound to a thousand things, unknown to himself.” - Guyon, Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte
90. “A rose lay open in full bloomand, looking from my garden room,I watched the sun-baked flower fill with rain.It seemed so fragile,resting there,and such a silence filled the air,the beauty of the moment caused me pain."What more?" I thought. "There must be more."As if in answer then, I sawone weighty drop that caused my rose to fall.It trembled, then cascaded downto earth just staining gentle brownand, since then, I've felt different.That's all.” - Julie Andrews
91. “I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.” - Isaac Asimov
92. “The Amish are islands of sanity in a whirlpool of change.” - Nancy Sleeth
93. “Take a walk outside - it will serve you far more than pacing around in your mind.” - Rasheed Ogunlaru
94. “In order to pick something up, you've got to put something down.” - Todd Stocker
95. “From innumerable complexities we must grow to simplicity; we must become simple in our inward life and in our outward needs.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti
96. “In human character, simplicity doesn't exist except among simpletons.” - Tennessee Williams
97. “I beseech you, little brothers, that you be as wise as brother Daisy and brother dandelion; for never do they lie awake thinking of tomorrow, yet they have gold crowns like kings and emperors or like Charlemagne in all his glory.” - G.K. Chesterton
98. “Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like'. Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality. It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. Until we see how unbalanced our culture has become at this point, we will not be able to deal with the mammon spirit within ourselves nor will we desire Christian simplicity.” - Richard J. Foster
99. “It’s as simple as that. Simple and complicated, as most true things are.” - David Levithan
100. “My mathematics is simple: one plus one = one.” - Dejan Stojanovic
101. “Mediocrity comforts the masses. Mediocrity is a likeable attribute.” - Shobhaa De
102. “If we think we will have joy only by praying and singing psalms, we will be disillusioned. But if we fill our lives with simple good things and constantly thank God for them, we will be joyful, that is, full of joy. And what about our problems? When we determine to dwell on the good and excellent things in life, we will be so full of those things that they will tend to swallow our problems.” - Richard J. Foster
103. “If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.- Mitchell translation” - Rainer Maria Rilke
104. “Do not let your grand ambitions stand in the way of small but meaningful accomplishments.” - Bryant McGill
105. “It's strange how the simple things in life go on while we become difficult.” - Richard Brautigan
106. “I have had to learn the simplest thingslast. Which made for difficulties.” - Charles Olsen
107. “Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson
108. “Simplicity is the most difficult of all concepts.” - Brian Herbert
109. “I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.” - Victor Hugo
110. “It was as simple as that - they met. As simple as only beautiful things can be beautiful, as only life-changing things, turning-point things, can be simple.("For The Rest Of Her Life")” - Cornell Woolrich
111. “You cannot pour more water into a full cup without causing a spillage.” - Rasheed Ogunlaru
112. “Simplicity is a bliss that makes one comprehend.” - Criss Jami
113. “Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west.The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.” - Louise Erdrich
114. “You can have a less chaotic, simpler life working with what you already have and transforming it into what you really need.” - Sandy Kreps
115. “There are times when wisdom cannot be found in the chambers of parliament or the halls of academia but at the unpretentious setting of the kitchen table.” - E.A. Bucchianeri
116. “The way towards simplicity is through outrage.” - William Golding
117. “A condition of complete simplicity(Costing not less than everything)” - T.S. Eliot
118. “Freedom is the realization that it is sufficient to simply be a human being.” - Bryant McGill
