Simplicity Quotes

Albert Einstein heads a small list, followed by Steve Maraboli, François Fénelon and others with two entries each. The sourced lines include Edsger Dijkstra’s from 1975, that simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability, and Goldsmith’s from The Deserted Village (1770), about one native charm being dearer than all the gloss of art.

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time” is credited to Mark Twain and marked misattributed. The notes give the French original, “Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte,” which is Pascal’s, from the Provincial Letters. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” is credited to Leonardo da Vinci and disputed.

Random quote on Simplicity

Most quoted on simplicity:

Clancy got a very simple view of the world. Good versus evil. Evil seems to get the upper hand. Good triumphs with vastly superior automatic weapons!

Bill Bailey

Simpler manners, purer lives; more self-denial; more earnest sympathy with the classes that lie below us, nothing short of that can lay the foundations of the Christianity which is to be hereafter, deep and broad.

Frederick William Robertson

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

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

Alan Perlis

When true simplicity is gain'd
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight
'Till by turning, turning we come round right.

Joseph Brackett Simple Gifts (1848)