This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"People who know they will die live very carefully. Not careful as in fearful; careful as in full of care. Every word, every act, every relationship holds the possibility of giving birth to something filled with great care. And that thing need not be showy or dramatic, for the most potent spiritual acts are often acts of breathtaking simplicity: a simple prayer, a sip of wine and a piece of bread, a single breath in meditation, a sprinkling of water on the forehead, an exchange of rings, a kind word, a hand on the cheek, a blessing." - Wayne Muller
"There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
"In view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, [the masses] more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one." - Adolph Hitler
"Quiet and unacclaimed acts are, to me, the real margin of greatness. Greatness is not in popularity, wealth, or long life, as most people believe. Real greatness is in simplicity and supportive words. It is in firm encouragement and gentle patience. It is in finding god in the midst of the turmoil of the marketplace, and remembering His goodness during hardship. No, greatness is not always found in those whom the world calls its heroes, but in the unheard of saints who unselfishly serve their families, lend a kind ear to a friend in despair, and lovingly see the Best in those who have become too accustomed to seeing themselves as mediocre." - Alan Cohen
"Quiet and unacclaimed acts are, to me, the real margin of greatness. Greatness is not in popularity, wealth, or long life, as most people believe. Real greatness is in simplicity and supportive words. It is in firm encouragement and gentle patience. It is in finding god in the midst of the turmoil of the marketplace, and remembering His goodness during hardship. No, greatness is not always found in those whom the world calls its heroes, but in the unheard of saints who unselfishly serve their families, lend a kind ear to a friend in despair, and lovingly see the Best in those who have become too accustomed to seeing themselves as mediocre." -
"Quiet and unacclaimed acts are, to me, the real margin of greatness. Greatness is not in popularity, wealth, or long life, as most people believe. Real greatness is in simplicity and supportive words. It is in firm encouragement and gentle patience. It is in finding god in the midst of the turmoil of the marketplace, and remembering His goodness during hardship. No, greatness is not always found in those whom the world calls its heroes, but in the unheard of saints who unselfishly serve their families, lend a kind ear to a friend in despair, and lovingly see the Best in those who have become too accustomed to seeing themselves as mediocre." -
"Seek simplicity and distrust it." - Alfred North Whitehead
"The farther we advance in knowledge, the more simplicity shall we discover in those primary rules that regulate all the apparently endless, complicated, and multiform operations of the Godhead." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Genuine simplicity of heart is a healing and cementing process." - Edmund Burke
"All the great religions of the world supply, for those who can subscribe to their arguments and affirmations, a world-conception that has logical simplicity and serene majesty." - Gordon Willard Allport
"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"The greatest miracle is the discovery that all is miraculous. And the nature of the miraculous is- utter simplicity." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Simplicity is the character of the spring of life, costliness becomes its autumn; but a neatness and purity, like that of the snow-drop or lily of the valley, is the peculiar fascination of beauty, to which it lends enchantment, and gives what amiability is to the mind." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"True elegance becomes the more so as it approaches simplicity." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Art has no excellence higher than true simplicity. Art has no abomination baser than artificial simplicity." - Jacob Klatzkin
"We are all interconnected and help being one another into the expression of our full potential through words, thoughts, and deeds that are unimaginable in their simplicity and untraceable in their complexity…Integrity means wholeness. Actions are whole when they conform to inner believes." - Joan Borysenko
"Voluntary simplicity keeps me mindful of what is important, of an ecology of mind and body and world in which everything is interconnected and every choice has far-reaching consequences. You don’t get to control it at all. But choosing simplicity whenever possible adds to life an element of deepest freedom which so easily eludes us, and many opportunities to discover that less may actually be more." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
"A cheerful temper, joined with innocence, will make beauty attractive, knowledge delightful, and wit good natured. It will lighten sickness, poverty and affliction; convert ignorance into an amiable simplicity, and render deformity itself agreeable." - Joseph Addison
"Taste has never been corrupted by simplicity." - Joseph Joubert
"Twelve Things to Remember: The value of time. The success of perseverance. The pleasure of working. The dignity of simplicity. The worth of character. The power of kindness. The influence of example. The obligation of duty. The wisdom of economy. The virtue of patience. The improvement of talent. The joy of originating." - Marshall Field
"The first fault is the child of simplicity, but every other the offspring of guilt." - Oliver Goldsmith
"For the first time, the best may err, art may persuade and novelty spread out its charms. The first fault is the child of simplicity; but every other the offspring of guilt." - Oliver Goldsmith
"Simplicity is Nature's first step, and the last of Art." - Philip James Bailey
"Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity - I meant he true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only an euphemism for folly?" - Plato NULL
"Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity — I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly." - Plato NULL
"God is a Being of perfect simplicity and truth, both in deed and word, and neither changes in himself nor imposes upon others." - Plato NULL
"We have in the notion of God absolute immensity, simplicity, and a unity that embraces all other attributes; and of this idea we find no example in us." - René Descartes
"Nature has simplicity and therefore great beauty." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
"The key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity." - Sogyal Rinpoche
"One who understands much displays a greater simplicity of character than one who understands little." - Stuart Alexander Chase
"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. We started and know the place for the first time. Through the unknown remembered gate where the earth left to discover is that which was the beginning. At the source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall and the children in the apple tree. Not known, because not looked for. But heart, half heard in the stillness between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now always a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything. And all shall beware and all manner of things shall beware when the tongues of flames are enfolded into the crown not of fire, and the fire and the rose are one." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"Purity and simplicity are the two wings with which man soars above the earth and all temporary nature. Simplicity is in the intention, purity in the affection; simplicity turns to God; purity unites with and enjoys Him." - Thomas Kempis, aka Thomas à Kempis, Thomas von Kempen, Thomas Haemerkken or Hammerlein or Hemerken or Hämerken
"Simplicity deepens life. It magnifies the simple virtues on which man’s survival depends: humility, faith, courage, serenity, honesty, patience, justice, tolerance, thrift. Simplicity is the arrow of the spirit." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought." - William Hazlitt
"The essence of voluntary simplicity is living in a way what is outwardly simple and inwardly rich." - Duane Elgin
"Voluntary simplicity involves both inner and outer condition. It means singleness of purpose, sincerity and honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life. It means an ordering and guiding of our energy and our desires, a partial restraint in some directions in order to secure greater abundance of life in other directions. It involves a deliberate organization of life for a purpose. Of course, as different people have different purposes in life, what is relevant to the purpose of one person might not be relevant to the purpose of another....The degree of simplification is a matter for each individual to settle for himself." - Duane Elgin
"The word God is a theology in itself, indivisibly one, inexhaustibly various, from the vastness and simplicity of its meaning. Admit a God, and you introduce among the subjects of your knowledge a fact encompassing, closing in upon, absorbing ever other fact conceivable. " - Francis William Newman
"Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art. " - Frédéric Chopin, fully Frédéric François Chopin, born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin
"Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious." - George Meredith
"Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories." - Graham Greene
"The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer." - Heinz Pagels
"All that is required for a complete pacification of the spiritual house is the negation through pure faith of all the spiritual faculties and gratifications and appetites. This achieved, the soul will be joined with the Beloved in a union of simplicity and purity and love and likeness... In the night of sense there is yet some light, because the intellect and reason remain and suffer no blindness. But his spiritual night of faith removes everything, both in the intellect and in the senses. The less a soul works with its own abilities, the more securely it proceeds, because its progress in faith is greater." - John Yepes “Saint John of the Cross”
"The wisdom, teaching, and counsel of the Bible are not in conflict with the ultimate attainments of the human mind, but, rather, well ahead of our attitudes… Its aim is not to record history but rather to record the encounter of the divine and the human on the level of concrete living. Incomparably more important than all the beauty or wisdom that it bestows upon our lives is the way it opens to man an understanding of what God means, of attaining holiness through justice, through simplicity of soul, through choice. Above all it never ceases to proclaim that worship of God without justice to man is an abomination; that while man'’ problem is God, God’s problem is man." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"It is because simplicity and vastness are both beautiful that we seek by preference simple facts and vast facts; that we take delight, now in following the giant courses of the stars, now in scrutinizing the microscope that prodigious smallness which is also a vastness, and now in seeking in geological ages the traces of a past that attracts us because of its remoteness." - Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
"The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things. " - Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
"The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism ... for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe." -