Simplicity Is Beauty Quotes

And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered. But most of all, I learned that life is about sitting on benches next to ancient creeks with my hand on her knee and sometimes, on good days, for falling in love.

This is the definition of happiness: a whole day stretching out ahead of me, beautiful in its emptiness and simplicity.

When I look back at those years, I feel touched and almost pained by the simplicity of the life I was living, because I knew what I had to do, and I did it, that was all.

Why Not You? Today, many will awaken with a fresh sense of inspiration. Why not you? Today, many will open their eyes to the beauty that surrounds them. Why not you? Today, many will choose to leave the ghost of yesterday behind and seize the immeasurable power of today. Why not you? Today, many will break through the barriers of the past by looking at the blessings of the present. Why not you? Today, for many the burden of self doubt and insecurity will be lifted by the security and confidence of empowerment. Why not you? Today, many will rise above their believed limitations and make contact with their powerful innate strength. Why not you? Today, many will choose to live in such a manner that they will be a positive role model for their children. Why not you? Today, many will choose to free themselves from the personal imprisonment of their bad habits. Why not you? Today, many will choose to live free of conditions and rules governing their own happiness. Why not you? Today, many will find abundance in simplicity. Why not you? Today, many will be confronted by difficult moral choices and they will choose to do what is right instead of what is beneficial. Why not you? Today, many will decide to no longer sit back with a victim mentality, but to take charge of their lives and make positive changes. Why not you? Today, many will take the action necessary to make a difference. Why not you? Today, many will make the commitment to be a better mother, father, son, daughter, student, teacher, worker, boss, brother, sister, & so much more. Why not you? Today is a new day! Many will seize this day. Many will live it to the fullest. Why not you?

Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.

In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace.

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity

Her complexity is a glorious fire that consumes, while her simplicity goes unapproachable. But if one takes time to understand her, there is something beautiful to find, something simple to be loved. But she goes unloved, for being misunderstood.

Nature has a great simplicity and therefore a great beauty

All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.

Charisma is the numinous aura around a narcissistic personality. It flows outward from a simplicity or unity of being and a composure and controlled vitality. There is gracious accommodation, yet commanding impersonality. Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self love.

I understood that every flower created by Him is beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would no longer be enameled with lovely hues. And so it is in the world of souls, Our Lord's living garden.

I woke up early and took the first train to take me away from the city. The noise and all its people. I was alone on the train and had no idea where I was going, and that’s why I went there. Two hours later we arrived in a small town, one of those towns with one single coffee shop and where everyone knows each other’s name. I walked for a while until I found the water, the most peaceful place I know. There I sat and stayed the whole day, with nothing and everything on my mind, cleaning my head. Silence, I learned, is some times the most beautiful sound.

There is a different beauty in simplicity, in a single line placed just so, a single flower among the rocks. The harshness of the stone makes the flower more precious.

Modern civilization has made woman a little wiser, but it has increased her suffering because of man's covetousness. The woman of yesterday was a happy wife, but the woman of today is a miserable mistress. In the past she walked blindly in the light, but now she walks open-eyed in the dark. She was beautiful in her ignorance, virtuous in her simplicity, and strong in her weakness. Today she has become ugly in her ingenuity, superficial and heartless in her knowledge. Will the day ever come when beauty and knowledge, ingenuity and virtue, and weakness of body and strength of spirit will be united in a woman?

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

Beauty is not in complexity but it's in simplicity.

It’s stranger than every strangeness And the dreams of all the poets And the thoughts of all the philosophers, That things are really what they seem to be And there’s nothing to understand.

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")

The man stopped talking and was looking at the sunset. But what does someone who hates and loves want with a sunset?

It was our belief that the love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome. . . . Children must early learn the beauty of generosity. They are taught to give what they prize most, that they may taste the happiness of giving. . . . The Indians in their simplicity literally give away all that they have—to relatives, to guests of other tribes or clans, but above all to the poor and the aged, from whom they can hope for no return.

Nature doesn’t see things through the prism of good or bad. It rewards efficiency. That’s the beautiful simplicity of evolution. It matches design to environment.

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.

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.

The world was beautiful when looked at in this way—without any seeking, so simple, so childlike.

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.

How we live matters, and what you choose to own will shape your life, whether you choose to admit it or not. Let's live lightly, freely, courageously, surrounded only by what brings joy, simplicity, and beauty.

This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with its beautiful stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth--a world which now trembles before the King In Yellow.

He punched me in the face," Ash said, who understandably did not seem to find the situation humorous at all. "And then he yelled at me for sleeping with our personal trainer!" "I was told breakup scenes were a good way to distract people," Jared said with beautiful simplicity. "Ash looked so surprised," Holly said. "He had no idea what was going on. He said, 'I didn't sleep with our personal trainer! We don't even have a personal trainer!'" Angela and Holly giggled. Ash held the back of his hand to his bleeding mouth and glared. Jared was still grinning like a maniac. "In that case," he told Ash solemnly, "I will consider taking you back.

The best remedy for those who are frightened, lovely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere they can be alone, alone with the sky, nature and God. For then and only then can you feel that everything is as it should be and that God wants people to be happy amid nature's beauty and simplicity.

The core of beauty is simplicity.

All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares.

Why was "plain" a euphemism for "ugly," when the very hallmark of human beauty was its plainness, the symmetry and simplicity that always seemed so young and so innocent. It was impossible not to think that here beauty was one of the most important things about her - something having to do with who she really was.

It is not your beautiful face or soft skin that kills me; it is your simplicity and being you.

I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow.

I keep my kindness in my eyes Gently folded around my iris Like a velvety, brown blanket That warms my vision I keep my shyness in my hair Tucked away into a ponytail Looking for a chance to escape On a few loose strands in the air I keep my anger on my lips Just waiting to unleash into the world But trust me; it’s never in my heart It evaporates into words I keep my dignity upon my chin Like a torch held up high For those who have betrayed me Radiating a silent, strong message I keep my gratitude in my smile A glistening waterfall in the sun Gently splashing at that person Who made me happy for some reason I keep my sensitivity in my hands Reaching out for your wet cheek Holding you, with all the love The love I want to share, and feel I keep my passion in my writing My words breathing like fire Screeching against an endless road As I continue to be inspired I keep my simplicity in my soul Spread over me like a clear sky Reflecting all that I am And all that’s ever passed me by And I hope you will look Beyond my ordinary face My simple, tied hair My ordinary tastes And I hope you will see me From everyone...apart As I keep my beauty in my heart.

STOP TRYING TO WORK THINGS OUT before their times have come. Accept the limitations of living one day at a time. When something comes to your attention, ask Me whether or not it is part of today’s agenda. If it isn’t, release it into My care and go on about today’s duties. When you follow this practice, there will be a beautiful simplicity about your life: a time for everything, and everything in its time.

Charlie thinks about Dev and about the beautiful simplicity of being seen.

[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.

One of the purest souls ever to live on this fallen planet was Nicholas Herman, known as Brother Lawrence. He wrote very little, but what he wrote has seemed to several generations of Christians to be so rare and so beautiful as to deserve a place near the top among the world's great books of devotion. The writings of Brother Lawrence are the ultimate in simplicity; ideas woven like costly threads to make a pattern of great beauty.

All my own perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded upon Our Lady.

These people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of race pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naive, spontaneous laughter. Harmony, radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty in the race they had marked for destructions.

When there is the moon, the night automatically becomes beautiful; there might be no need for extra light. Light must be saved for those moments when the night is dark, and the moon doesn't appear in the sky. Plain paths are not always straightforward. You might encounter uneven, sometimes steep, sometimes flat obstacles along the way. That's the nature of a path. Therefore, after reaching an easy path, the walking stick should not be discarded.

If nature leads us to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty—by forms, I am referring to coherent systems of hypotheses, axioms, etc.—to forms that no one has previously encountered, we cannot help thinking that they are “true,” that they reveal a genuine feature of nature…. You must have felt this too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationships which nature suddenly spreads out before us and for which none of us was in the least prepared.

Learn to understand the real beauty of simplicity.

The whole idea of it makes me feel like I'm coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light-- a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one and the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit. At four I was an Arabian wizard. I could make myself invisible by drinking a glass of milk a certain way. At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince. But now I am mostly at the window watching the late afternoon light. Back then it never fell so solemnly against the side of my tree house, and my bicycle never leaned against the garage as it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it. This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, time to turn the first big number. It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.

So much wanting and longing, clutching, desiring, passion and hatred and terrible need. Here, death was suitable, there was room for it, the grip of life's relentless urges slackened, replaced by this icy simplicity. This wasnt her death. It was his. That was the sad and honest truth. Though it would stay with her, it would be more like a black onyx heart on a silver chain, worn privately, under her clothes, close to her body, all her life. The guilt, the beauty, everything. It wasnt over, it had only begun. Well ok then, Okay.

Skin like ivory, perfect; A goddess, she must be. Slender fingers, unadorned; beautiful simplicity. A single teardrop; when did it fall? Could this goddess be mortal, after all?

She never had much in this life, but with the simplest things, she made her corner of the world as beautiful as any king's palace. We may lack riches, but the greatest fortune is what lies in our hearts.

As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.

The beauty of the flute was in its simplicity, in its resemblance to the human voice. It always sounded clear. It sounded alone. The piano, on the other hand, was a network of parts—a ship, with its strings like rigging, its case a hull, its lifted lid a sail. Kestrel always thought that the piano didn't sound like a single instrument but a twinned one, with its low and high halves merging together or pulling apart.

Then he closed his eyes and put his hands together again before his face, finger to finger. Johnny was struck by the kid's lack of pretension. There was a simplicity about the gesture that had been honed by use into beauty.

Life has its beauty in its simplicity. Ugliness raises her head with complexity.

Her idea had a beautiful simplicity at first.

Water’s water and that’s why it’s beautiful.

The line that describes the beautiful is elliptical. It has simplicity and constant change. It cannot be described by a compass, and it changes direction at every one of its points.

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.

A slight concussion of the brain simplifies matters so beautifully. ("Three O'Clock")

When you cannot feel, The purity of love, The tenderness of beauty, The drinkability of wine, The simplicity of a smile, You have to go back and drink coffee

He believed in the beauty and simplicity of doing something the way it has always been done but better than anyone else has ever done it.

I think about this, not like someone thinking, but like someone breathing, And I look at flowers and I smile... I don’t know if they understand me Or if I understand them, But I know the truth is in them and in me And in our common divinity Of letting ourselves go and live on the Earth And carrying us in our arms through the contented Seasons And letting the wind sing us to sleep And not have dreams in our sleep.

Naturally, I have no heroes: I am my heroes. I am my brothers and sisters. I feel myself joined by the soul with all beauty. My heart sings with every brave endeavour. With the strange wings of impossible butterflies, with every rock that breathes life into the world. I stand shoulder to shoulder with all denouncers of meanness. I honour spirit and faith and uphold the glorious amateur. I'm in love with desperate men with desperate hands, walking in second-hand shoes searching for God and hearing God and hating God. I'm a desperate man, buckled with fear, I am a desperate man who demands to be listened to, who demands to connect. I'm a desperate man who denounces the dullness of money and status. I'm a desperate man who will not bow down to accolade or success. I'm a desperate man who loves the simplicity of painting and hates galleries and white walls and the dealers in art. Who loves unreasonableness and hotheadedness, who loves contradiction, hates publishing houses and also I am Vincent Van Gogh, Hiroshige and every living artist who dares to draw God on this planet.

Wabi is about finding beauty in simplicity, and a spiritual richness and serenity in detaching from the material world. Sabi is more concerned with the passage of time, with the way that all things grow and decay and how ageing alters the visual nature of those things. It’s less about what we see, and more about how we see.

The eastern sky was red as coals in a forge, lighting up the flats along the river. Dew had wet the million needles of the chaparral, and when the rim of the sun edged over the horizon the chaparral seemed to be spotted with diamonds. A bush in the backyard was filled with little rainbows as the sun touched the dew. It was tribute enough to sunup that it could make even chaparral bushes look beautiful, Augustus thought, and he watched the process happily, knowing it would only last a few minutes. The sun spread reddish-gold light through the shining bushes, among which a few goats wandered, bleating. Even when the sun rose above the low bluffs to the south, a layer of light lingered for a bit at the level of the chaparral, as if independent of its source. The the sun lifted clear, like an immense coin. The dew quickly died, and the light that filled the bushes like red dirt dispersed, leaving clear, slightly bluish air. It was good reading light by then, so Augustus applied himself for a few minutes to the Prophets. He was not overly religious, but he did consider himself a fair prophet and liked to study the styles of his predecessors. They were mostly too long-winded, in his view, and he made no effort to read them verse for verse—he just had a look here and there, while the biscuits were browning.

I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity. The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain.

Beauty is an expression of the inner and outer simplicity, kindness, and uniqueness of a person.

A row of trees far away, there on the hillside. But what is it, a row of trees? It’s just trees. Row and the plural trees aren’t things, they’re names.

Scientists and mathematicians are trained to dig below the surface of the chaotic, natural world to search for unexpected simplicity, structure, and even beauty.

The mountains had bestowed on us their beauties, and we adored them with a child’s simplicity and revered them with a monk’s veneration of the divine. Annapurna,

There is an expression in Japanese that says that someone who makes things of poor quality is in fact worse than a thief because he doesn't make things that will last or provide true satisfaction. A thief at least redistributes the wealth of a society.

Penny knew also she loved the country for its beauty. Cities could be magnificent, astounding, fantastic, but they were not consistently beautiful and simple. Penny liked uncomplicated beauty.

I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity; in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It's about bringing order to complexity.

A rose lay open in full bloom and, 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 saw one weighty drop that caused my rose to fall. It trembled, then cascaded down to earth just staining gentle brown and, since then, I've felt different. That's all.

The best remedy for those who are frightened, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere they can be alone, alone with the sky, nature and God. For then and only then can you feel that everything is as it should be and that God wants people to be happy amid nature's beauty and simplicity. As long as this exists, and that should be forever, I know that there will be solace for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances. I firmly believe that nature can bring comfort to all who suffer.

A minimalist by intent, I live a beautiful life with fewer things—simple, yet full.

The need to complicate something whose very beauty lay in simplicity and passion.

Simplicity is the key to beauty. Clarity is the key to perfection.

The beautiful thing about simplicity is that it is flexible, modular, cheap and light.

And what is that thing which you promise to provide?- 'The beauty of the soul and the simplicity of happiness', he replied.

Take the time to observe the simple and ponder upon the seemingly insignificant. You’ll find a wealth of depth and beauty.

Those intricate curves and patterns your people create are beyond human eyes and hands to make. Perhaps we wished to avoid a poor imitation that would only have been an ever-present reminder to us of what we had lost. There is a different beauty in simplicity, in a single line placed just so, a single flower among the rocks. The harshness of the stone makes the flower more precious. We try not to dwell too much on what is gone. The strongest heart will break under that strain.

All the evil in the world comes from us bothering with each other, Wanting to do good, wanting to do evil. Our soul and the sky and the earth are enough for us. To want more is to lose this, and be unhappy.

As long as this exists,” I thought, “this sunshine and this cloudless sky, and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad?” The best remedy for those who are frightened, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere they can be alone, alone with the sky, nature and God. For then and only then can you feel that everything is as it should be and that God wants people to be happy amid nature’s beauty and simplicity. As long as this exists, and that should be forever, I know that there will be solace for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances. I firmly believe that nature can bring comfort to all who suffer.

You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity.” —Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate in physics

You don’t need much to give. Give what you have.

We ought to compliment and not to compete with one another.

Without a little chaos life will be dull, unbeautiful, for we have been trained not to align with simplicity for too long.

I strive for simplicity and believe simplicity is beauty.

In death, he had given her what remained of his life, and this was the most beautiful thing. Perhaps we can only give in total beauty and simplicity in the moment of our dying, because that is the only giving that demands no return.

All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we has a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.

Miss Bates…had never boasted either beauty or cleverness. Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle of life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible. And yet she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good-will. It was her own universal goodwill and contented temper which worked such wonders. She loved every body, was interested in every body’s happiness and quick-sighted to every body’s merits; thought herself a most fortunate creature, and surrounded with blessings in such an excellent mother and so many good neighbours and friends, and a home that wanted for nothing. The simplicity and cheerfulness of her nature, her contented and grateful spirit, were a recommendation to every body and a mine of felicity to herself.

By simplifying our lives, we rediscover our child-like stalk of innocents that reconnects us with the central resin of our innate humanity that knows truth and goodness. To see the world through a lens of youthful rapture is to see life for what it can be and to see for ourselves what we wish to become. In this beam of newly discovered ecstasy for life, we realize the splendor of love, life, and the unbounded beauty of the natural world.

What does this think about that? Nothing thinks about anything. Does the earth have consciousness of its stones and plants? If it did, it would be people. . . Why am I worrying about this? If I think about these things, I’ll stop seeing trees and plants And stop seeing the Earth For only seeing my thoughts... I’ll get unhappy and stay in the dark. And so, without thinking, I have the Earth and the Sky.

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.

He thought about explaining math’s beauty to her, the elegance of an equation, the simplicity within the complexity. The thrill of touching truth and knowing it as ancient and unassailable, as permanent and profound.

If there is anything like a unifying aesthetic principle in mathematics, it is this: simple is beautiful. Mathematicians enjoy thinking about the simplest possible things, and the simplest possible things are imaginary.

Seeing the world with all the unspoiled simplicity of a young child, you are free from concepts of beauty and ugliness, good and evil, and no longer fall prey to conflicting tendencies driven by desire or repulsion. Why trouble yourself about all the ups and downs of daily life, like a child who delights in building a sand castle but cries when it collapses? To get what they want and be rid of what they dislike, look how people throw themselves into torments, like moths plunging into the flame of a lamp! Would it not be better to put down your heavy burden of dreamlike obsessions once and for all? 

I'm painfully aware that the experts in fields like religion and spirituality sometimes feel that bringing mysticism down so far into ordinary life is an insult to the great mystics and makes it all too light and breezy. I feel just the opposite. I believe that one day we'll understand that we've lost out on religion because we made it too lofty and distant. I see it as a simple quality of everyday life, and in that simplicity lie its beauty and importance.

Well," he said, "in law, we talk about a beautiful summation, or a beautiful judgment: and what we mean by that, of course, is the loveliness of not only its logic but its expression. And similarly, in math, when we talk about a beautiful proof, what we’re recognizing is the simplicity of the proof, its … elementalness, I suppose: its inevitability.

Jesus came a long way from heaven for you. You certainly matter to Him. He came to give you life and life more abundantly (John 10:10). You are not just a face in a crowd or a number. No, He knows you by name and has a personal love for you; and in spite of the mess which you might be in, He wants to meet your every need and make your life beautiful!

Every evening, they enjoyed the moonlit streams, and in the day they explored the valleys, searching for plum blossoms. When they happened upon a sheer cliff face they would compose poems and play the lute in the shade of the pine trees.

There was beauty in the simplicity of programming. If something was illogical, it simply wouldn’t work.

Simplicity is the ultimate beauty of life.

We came into existence with nothing. And, when our spirit departs, we will take nothing out of world.

Generally speaking, our stuff can be divided into three categories: useful stuff, beautiful stuff, and emotional stuff.

Between two people everything becomes complicated when only one is in love and when both are in love, complication disappears and there remains only the beauty of simplicity.

Re-programming your mind, body & spirit is like planting a garden, if the soil isn't right nothing will grow.

to see a world in a grain of sand,” then perhaps we can see all nature in a hare: its simplicity and intricacy, fragility and glory, transience and beauty.

The periodic table was incredibly beautiful, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I could never adequately analyze what I meant here by beauty – simplicity? coherence? rhythm? inevitability? Or perhaps it was the symmetry, the comprehensiveness of every element firmly locked into its place, with no gaps, no exceptions, everything implying everything else.

in law, we talk about a beautiful summation, or a beautiful judgment: and what we mean by that, of course, is the loveliness of not only its logic but its expression. And similarly, in math, when we talk about a beautiful proof, what we’re recognizing is the simplicity of the proof, its … elementalness, I suppose: its inevitability.

Happy the old people who after long experience and many trials reach this superior simplicity of true wisdom, which they had glimpsed from a distance in their childhood! With this meaning it can be said that a beautiful life is a thought of youth realized in maturity.

Beauty and wisdom create the personality of the perfect individual but beauty isn’t achieved through the success of wisdom.. beauty is the innate quality of an individual who owns simplicity and respect..

This is the beautiful secret of minimalism: It may seem like it’s about stuff, but once you’ve cut through the clutter and adopted a new frame of mind, you learn that it’s barely about ‘the stuff’ at all.

Real science is creative, as much so as painting, sculpture, or writing.Beauty, variously defined, is the criterion for art, and likewise a good theory has the elegance, proportion, and simplicity that we find beautiful. Just as the skilled artist omits the extraneous and directs our attention to a unifying concept, so the scientist strives to find a relatively simple order underlying the apparent chaos of perception.

The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation; now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper.

There is a sweetness in being the sole source, the autocratic and irresponsible cause of the greatest joy and profoundest pain to another, and I was like wax in Zinaïda's hands; though, indeed, I was not the only one in love with her. All the men who visited the house were crazy over her, and she kept them all in leading-strings at her feet. It amused her to arouse their hopes and then their fears, to turn them round her finger (she used to call it knocking their heads together), while they never dreamed of offering resistance and eagerly submitted to her. About her whole being, so full of life and beauty, there was a peculiarly bewitching mixture of slyness and carelessness, of artificiality and simplicity, of composure and frolicsomeness; about everything she did or said, about every action of hers, there clung a delicate, fine charm, in which an individual power was manifest at work. And her face was ever changing, working too; it expressed, almost at the same time, irony, dreaminess, and passion. Various emotions, delicate and quick-changing as the shadows of clouds on a sunny day of wind, chased one another continually over her lips and eyes.

An indisputable law of physics, water always finds the lowest level in an incredibly efficient manner. It penetrates any crevice or path that will facilitate its downward flow, steadily meandering and descending in search of lower planes. In our physical world, water is as efficient as gravity is unforgiving. Human beings are mostly water. The body is comprised of more than 70% water and it is always tragic when human beings, true to their chemical composition, emulate the efficiency of water during dark, difficult periods in their lives, allowing one misstep or transgression to lead to lower and lower descent. Water can be beautiful to watch as it cascades downward in its transparent and fluid simplicity, but some human beings also have a tendency to fall and sink, like water without the beauty.

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".

To follow Jesus, especially in the Western world, is to live in that same tension between grateful, happy enjoyment of nice, beautiful things, and simplicity. And when in doubt, to err on the side of generous, simple living.

[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, the impermanent rather than the eternal and the simple rather than the ornate. The reason owes nothing to climate or genetics, added Keene, but is the result of the actions of writers, painters and theorists, who had actively shaped the sense of beauty of their nation. Contrary to the Romantic belief that we each settle naturally on a fitting idea of beauty, it seems that our visual and emotional faculties in fact need constant external guidance to help them decide what they should take note of and appreciate. 'Culture' is the word we have assigned to the force that assists us in identifying which of our many sensations we should focus on and apportion value to.

I will not subscribe to the argument that ornament increases the pleasure of the life of a cultivated person, or the argument which covers itself with the words: “But if the ornament is beautiful! ...” To me, and to all the cultivated people, ornament does not increase the pleasures of life. If I want to eat a piece of gingerbread I will choose one that is completely plain and not a piece which represents a baby in arms of a horserider, a piece which is covered over and over with decoration. The man of the fifteenth century would not understand me. But modern people will. The supporter of ornament believes that the urge for simplicity is equivalent to self-denial. No, dear professor from the College of Applied Arts, I am not denying myself! To me, it tastes better this way.

Zen has been called the "religion before religion," which is to say that anyone can practice, including those committed to another faith. And that phrase evokes that natural religion of our early childhood, when heaven and a splendorous earth were one. But soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, at the bottom of each breath, there is a hollow place filled with longing. We become seekers without knowing that we seek, and at first, we long for something "greater" than ourselves, something apart and far away. It is not a return to childhood, for childhood is not a truly enlightened state. Yet to seek one's own true nature is "a way to lead you to your long lost home." To practice Zen means to realize one's existence moment after moment, rather than letting life unravel in regret of the past and daydreaming of the future. To "rest in the present" is a state of magical simplicity...out of the emptiness can come a true insight into our natural harmony all creation. To travel this path, one need not be a 'Zen Buddhist', which is only another idea to be discarded like 'enlightenment,' and like 'the Buddha' and like 'God.

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...

Love's beauty is in its simplicity and authenticity.

Beauty is in the holiness of the heart and in the simplicity of mind.

The secret of a happy life is to live a life with child-like simplicity, appreciate nature’s beauty, and admire honesty.

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. -William Morris

Material goods rarely alter our levels of happiness, unlike emotional experience. Having can never replace being. -Ilsa Crawford

Beauty comes from tension: between order and disorder, simplicity and complexity.

If I talk about her like she’s a being It’s because talking about her I need to use the language of men Which gives personality to things, And imposes a name on things.

If they want me to have mysticism, okay, I’ve got it. I’m a mystic, but only in my body, My soul is simple and doesn’t think.

This life is short, but it contains everything. There is an inherent beauty in simplicity. Choose your path wisely; often the simple route is the most beautiful path to follow.

I suddenly asked my master Caeiro, “Are you at peace with yourself?” and he answered, “No, I’m at peace.” It was like the voice of the earth, which is everything and no one.

Your kindness, beauty, and simplicity remind me the stories about angels, and I was told they are just legends and myths.

Out of all virtues simplicity is my most favorite virtue. So much so that I tend to believe that simplicity can solve most of the problems, personal as well as the world problems. If the life approach is simple one need not lie so frequently, nor quarrel nor steal, nor envy, anger, abuse, kill. Everyone will have enough and plenty so need not hoard, speculate, gamle, hate. When character is beautiful, you are beautiful. That is the beauty of simplicity.

Whiteness and white people make themselves pervasive yet think of themselves as separate. It is parental and condescending in tone—it invented the concept of race conferring upon itself—a freak genetic accident—the values of intelligence, advancement, beauty, whereby the lower the level of melanin in the body, the higher your place in the hierarchy, the lighter the skin tone, the closer you are to whiteness therefore the better, more beautiful you are regarded, the more suited to power you are. The simplicity of this belief is in tandem with its terrible violence.

I grow into these mountains like a moss. I am bewitched. The blinding snow peaks and the clarion air, the sound of earth and heaven in the silence, the requiem birds, the mythic beasts, the flags, great horns, and old carved stones, the silver ice in the black river, the Kang, the Crystal Mountain. Also, I love the common miracles-the murmur of my friends at evening, the clay fires of smudgy juniper, the coarse dull food, the hardship and simplicity, the contentment of doing one thing at a time… gradually my mind has cleared itself, and wind and sun pour through my head, as through a bell. Though we talk little here, I am never lonely; I am returned into myself. In another life-this isn’t what I know, but how I feel- these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon- the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the supper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again to the sky.

I saw her simplicity, her ignorance, her childish unkindness, her unpretty anxious little face. She was not beautiful or brilliantly clever. How false it is to say that love is blind. I could even judge her, I could even condemn her, I could even, in some possible galactic loop of thought, make her suffer.

He turned his head and gazed at me, eyes dancing and blue, remnants of a smile dancing on his face. How beautiful he looked. Unsullied by the world's darker secrets; privy to its innocent ones. I could almost believe he was inhuman and had never known anything beyond the profound simplicity of nature, tameless and wild, and the animal hearts that beat within each and every one of us. He was Pan and I was Daphnis. I never stood a chance.

If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.

For the natural selectivity of the island I will have to substitute a conscious selectivity based on another sense of values – a sense of values I have become more aware of here. Island precepts, I might call them if I could define them, 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 intermittent of life: life of the spirit, creative life and the life of human relationships. A few shells.

With what delight did Ambrosio listen to the declaration of her artless gratitude! The natural grace of her manners, the unequalled sweetness of her voice, her modest vivacity, her unstudied elegance, her expressive countenance, and intelligent eyes united to inspire him with pleasure and admiration: While the solidity and correctness of her remarks received additional beauty from the unaffected simplicity of the language, in which they were conveyed.

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.

The tides of time should be able to imprint the passing of the years on an object. The physical decay or natural wear and tear of the materials used does not in the least detract from the visual appeal, rather it adds to it. It is the changes of texture and colour that provide the space for the imagination to enter and become more involved with the devolution of the piece. Whereas modern design often uses inorganic materials to defy the natural ageing effects of time, wabi sabi embraces them and seeks to use this transformation as an integral part of the whole. This is not limited to the process of decay, but can also be found at the moment of inception, when life is taking its first fragile steps toward becoming.

What has happened now is that I’ve fallen madly in love with a woman. And it seems to me so absolutely natural and genuine - there’s nothing problematic about it at all. I just feel proud and uncontrollably glad. These last weeks have been like one long dance of rich adventure, tenderness, intensity - an expedition into new domains of great simplicity and beauty.

If you pour a cup of tea, you are aware of extending your arm and touching your hand to the teapot, lifting it and pouring the water. Finally the water touches your teacup and fills it, and you stop pouring and put the teapot down precisely, as in the Japanese tea ceremony. You become aware that each precise movement has dignity. We have long forgotten that activities can be simple and precise. Every act of our lives can contain simplicity and precision and can thus have tremendous beauty and dignity.

My Cats I know. I know. they are limited, have different needs and concerns. but I watch and learn from them. I like the little they know, which is so much. they complain but never worry, they walk with a surprising dignity. they sleep with a direct simplicity that humans just can’t understand. their eyes are more beautiful than our eyes. and they can sleep 20 hours a day without hesitation or remorse. when I am feeling low all I have to do is watch my cats and my courage returns. I study these creatures. they are my teachers.

Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose," she read, and so reading she was ascending, she felt, on to the top, on to the summit. How satisfying! How restful! All the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean. And then there it was, suddenly entire; she held it in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, here--the sonnet. But she was becoming conscious of her husband looking at her. He was smiling at her, quizzically, as if he were ridiculing her gently for being asleep in broad daylight, but at the same time he was thinking, Go on reading. You don't look sad now, he thought. And he wondered what she was reading, and exaggerated her ignorance, her simplicity, for he liked to think that she was not clever, not book-learned at all. He wondered if she understood what she was reading. Probably not, he thought. She was astonishingly beautiful. Her beauty seemed to him, if that were possible, to increase.

Praise be to God I’m not good, And have the natural egotism of flowers And rivers following their bed Preoccupied without knowing it Only with blooming and flowing. This is the only mission in the World, This—to exist clearly, And to know how to do it without thinking about it.)

The best remedy for those who are frightened, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere they can be alone, alone with the sky, nature and God. For then and only then can you feel that everything is as it should be and that God wants people to be happy amid nature’s beauty and simplicity.

Finland is world-famous for its architects and decorators, who know how to produce beautiful effects in simple ways. On my first visit to Finland, I remember being invited into the living room of one of my host’s homes, and immediately thinking to myself, “This is the most beautiful room that I’ve ever seen!” On reflection, I then wondered why I found it so beautiful, because the room was a nearly-empty cubicle with just a few pieces of simple furniture. But the materials and form of the room, and those few pieces of furniture, were typically Finnish in their simplicity and beauty

I have always loved simplicity. With you, everything’s black and white, Richie had said, like an accusation; but the truth is that almost every murder case is, if not simple, capable of simplicity, and that this is not only necessary but breathtaking, that if there are miracles then this is one. In these rooms, the world’s vast hissing tangle of shadows burns away, all its treacherous grays are honed to the stark purity of a bare blade, two-edged: cause and effect, good and evil. To me, these rooms are beautiful. I go into them the way a boxer goes into the ring: intent, invincible, home.

Elegance is the correct posture if the writing is to be perfect. It’s the same with life: when all superfluous things have been discarded, we discover simplicity and concentration. The simpler and more sober the posture, the more beautiful it will be, even though, at first, it may seem uncomfortable.

All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation of the Word.

True eloquence is irresistible. It charms by its images of beauty, it enforces an argument by its vehement simplicity. Orators whose speeches are "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," only prevail where truth is not understood, for knowledge and simplicity are the foundation of all true eloquence. Eloquence abounds in beautiful and natural images, sublime but simple conceptions, in passionate but plain words. Burning words appeal to the emotions as well as to the intellect; they stir the soul and touch the heart.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never feel you have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, you will end up feeling like a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”  —David Foster Wallace, This Is Water

On a relatively unfrequented, stony beach there is a great rock which juts out over the sea. After a climb, an ascent from one jagged foothold to another, a natural shelf is reached where one person can stretch at length, and stare down into the tide rising and falling below, or beyond to the bay, where sails catch light, then shadow, then light, as they tack far out near the horizon. The sun has burned these rocks, and the great continuous ebb and flow of the tide has crumbled the boulders, battered them, worn them down to the smooth sun-scalded stones on the beach which rattle and shift underfoot as one walks over them. A serene sense of the slow inevitability of the gradual changes in the earth’s crust comes over me; a consuming love, not of a god, but of the clean unbroken sense that the rocks, which are nameless, the waves which are nameless, the ragged grass, which is nameless, are all defined momentarily through the consciousness of the being who observes them. With the sun burning into rock and flesh, and the wind ruffling grass and hair, there is an awareness that the blind immense unconscious impersonal and neutral forces will endure, and that the fragile, miraculously knit organism which interprets them, endows them with meaning, will move about for a little, then falter, fail, and decompose at last into the anonomous [sic] soil, voiceless, faceless, without identity. From this experience I emerged whole and clean, bitten to the bone by sun, washed pure by the icy sharpness of salt water, dried and bleached to the smooth tranquillity that comes from dwelling among primal things. From this experience also, a faith arises to carry back to a human world of small lusts and deceitful pettiness. A faith, naïve and child like perhaps, born as it is from the infinite simplicity of nature. It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.

Cambridge exceeded our most macabre expectations ... the arm-chairs, the crumpets, the beautifully-bound eighteenth century volumes, the fires roaring in stoked grates. Each of us had the loan of an absent undergraduate's rooms - bedroom, sitting-room and pantry; all fitted up in a style which, after the spartan simplicity of a public school study, seemed positively sinful.

The ring is simple with a diamond and a plain gold band but it symbolizes our time together. We have been on a roller coaster ride this entire year and I think we deserve some simplicity. That's what this ring is because asking you to marry me is the simplest thing ever. I had an idea forever ago for you to move in with me and it's the best thing that has ever happened to me. I thought I knew all there was to know about life and then you ran into mine. The second I saw you I knew one day you were going to be Mrs. Mitchell. Before I had time to think or breathe all of the pieces were falling together and now we're here. And as simple as taking my next breath I can say that I want you forever. So Isabelle Katherine Clark . . . Will you marry me?

Marya and Dimitri had given Sasha and Lev the simplicity—the beautiful normality—that they themselves had been denied. Dimitri had given Lev freedom from a life he’d never wanted. He’d given him choices. Last words would have been paltry in comparison to this: the Antonova witch who kissed him goodbye with the words let me go, because she would be back. She would be back, and she would be his.

The conclusion of Dowell's narrative offers not a resolution, so much as a plangent confirmation of complexities. While Ford would certainly have agreed with Dowell that it is a novelist's business to make a reader 'see things clearly', his interest in clarity had little to do with simplicity. There is no 'getting to the bottom of things', no triumphant answers to the epistemological muddle offered in this beautiful, bleak story - only a finer appreciation of that confusion. We may remove the scales from our eyes, Ford suggests, but only the better to appreciate the glass through which we see darkly.

As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or "terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. THe work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes.

He continued. “So I shall simply tell you the truth. I have spent my entire life preparing for a cold, unfeeling, unimpassioned life—a life filled with pleasantries and simplicity. And then you came into it . . . you . . . the opposite of all that. You are beautiful and brilliant and bold and so very passionate about life and love and those things that you believe in. And you taught me that everything I believed, everything I thought I wanted, everything I had spent my life espousing—all of it . . . it is wrong. I want your version of life . . . vivid and emotional and messy and wonderful and filled with happiness. But I cannot have it without you. “I love you, Juliana. I love the way you have turned my entire life upside down, and I am not certain I could live without you now that I have lived with you.

All of us - all who knew her - felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used - to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.

The whole idea of it makes me feel Like I’m coming down with something, Something worse than any stomach ache Or the headaches I get from reading in bad light – A kind of measles of the spirit A mumps of the psyche, A disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, But that is because you have forgotten The perfect simplicity of being one And the beautiful complexity introduced by two But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit At four I was an Arabian wizard I could make myself invisible By drinking a glass of milk a certain way. At seven I was a solider, at nine a prince. But now I am mostly at the window Watching the late afternoon light. Back then it never fell so solemnly Against the side of my tree house, And my bicycle never leaned against the garage As it does today, All the dark blue speed drained out of it. This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, As I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imagry friends, Time to turn the first big number.

Am I still writing? Unthinkable not to. In the very darkest night the words were like shiny pebbles. They caught the light of the moon and stars and reflected it back. One word among them that shone especially brightly. Simplicity. I would approach it, stepping softly, regard it from all sides, finally pick it up, enchanted by it, recognize that its enchantment lay in its shine, its pure meaning. Simplicity. To simply be there. Simply keep going. The longer I kept going, the easier it was to see how beautiful, simply beautiful, it is to be here. I would like to write about how this word shines. I'd like to write about the simplest things.

I wish you the sweetness of sticky kisses, the fragrance of muddy bouquets of weeds, the simplicity of macaroni necklaces, the warmth of bedtime snuggles, the promise of beautiful tomorrows. I wish you the hope to carry your heart through the hard times, the grace to forgive your inevitable mistakes, the strength to start again every morning, the wisdom to enjoy the journey. I wish you enough joy and laughter in the present to fill the silence that comes too soon when life grows quiet and rooms grow still and your heart beats in constant prayer for the once-small feet that now choose their own path guided by the whisper of their childhood.

Doors are funny things. Some lead to somewhere exciting and wonderful, while others lead to the mundane and ordinary. Some, because they are gaudy and ornate, usher us into the land of greed and money. But many look unassuming and plain, yet hidden behind their simplicity one can find love; warmth; a cozy fire; a home cooked meal and a beautiful family. It's these doors I search for in life and it's these doors that I shall find.

From this experience also, a faith arises to carry back to a human world of small lusts and deceitful pettiness. A faith, naive and child like perhaps, born as it is from the infinite simplicity of nature. It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.

Dynamical beauty transcends specific objects and phenomena, and invites us to imagine the expanse of possibilities. For example, the sizes and shapes of actual planetary orbits are not simple. They are neither the (compounded) circles of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Nicolaus Copernicus, nor even the more nearly accurate ellipses of Kepler, but rather curves that must be calculated numerically, as functions of time, evolving in complicated ways that depend on the positions and masses of the Sun and the other planets. There is great beauty and simplicity here, but it is only fully evident when we understand the deep design. The appearance of particular objects does not exhaust the beauty of the laws.

I do not recall my own first glance of love, my own first gift of love. Yet it happened. Those divine simplicities are erased from my heart. Good God, then what do I retain that is of value? The little boy that I was is dead forever, before my eyes. I survived him, but forgetfulness tormented me, then overcame me, the sad process of living ruined me, and I scarcely know what he knew. I remember things at random only, but the most beautiful, the sweetest memories are gone.

I faced people from all walks of business who fully disregarded design (though they were completely influenced by it). I also met fine artists who drowned in their own work and the dense creative universe in their minds. Then I met designers. And instantly fell in love. Let me tell you why. Designers are familiar with critiques. They not only tolerate them but actively look out for them. They honestly believe in iterations and learn to edit down their work. They embrace simplicity and create beauty based on requirements other than their own. Design education teaches you to run away from assumptions and to have the stomach to scrap your work often. I’m bringing this up because it’s time to bridge the gap between design and business.

The Yamato spirit is not a tame, tender plant, but a wild--in the sense of natural--growth; it is indigenous to the soil; its accidental qualities it may share with the flowers of other lands, but in its essence it remains the original, spontaneous outgrowth of our clime. But its nativity is not its sole claim to our affection. The refinement and grace of its beauty appeal to our æsthetic sense as no other flower can. We cannot share the admiration of the Europeans for their roses, which lack the simplicity of our flower. Then, too, the thorns that are hidden beneath the sweetness of the rose, the tenacity with which she clings to life, as though loth or afraid to die rather than drop untimely, preferring to rot on her stem; her showy colours and heavy odours--all these are traits so unlike our flower, which carries no dagger or poison under its beauty, which is ever ready to depart life at the call of nature, whose colours are never gorgeous, and whose light fragrance never palls. Beauty of colour and of form is limited in its showing; it is a fixed quality of existence, whereas fragrance is volatile, ethereal as the breathing of life. So in all religious ceremonies frankincense and myrrh play a prominent part. There is something spirituelle in redolence. When the delicious perfume of the sakura quickens the morning air, as the sun in its course rises to illumine first the isles of the Far East, few sensations are more serenely exhilarating than to inhale, as it were, the very breath of beauteous day.

My visit to Her Highness was an agreeable surprise for me. Instead of being ushered into the presence of an over-decorated woman, sporting diamond pendants and necklaces, I found myself in the presence of a modest young woman who relied not upon jewels or gaudy dress for beauty but on her own naturally well formed features and exactness of manners. Her room was as plainly furnished as she was plainly dressed. Her severe simplicity became an object of my envy. She seemed to me an object lesson for many a prince and many a millionaire whose loud ornamentation, ugly looking diamonds, rings and studs and still more loud and almost vulgar furniture offend the taste and present a terrible and sad contrast between them and the masses from whom they derive their wealth.

Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. And now I will at times explore every little nook of some poor coppice with almost anxious footsteps, so deep a hold has this imagination upon me. You too meet with a like imagination, doubtless, somewhere, wherever your ruling stars will have it, Saturn driving you to the woods, or the Moon, it may be, to the edges of the sea. I will not of a certainty believe that there is nothing in the sunset, where our forefathers imagined the dead following their shepherd the sun, or nothing but some vague presence as little moving as nothing. If beauty is not a gateway out of the net we were taken in at our birth, it will not long be beauty, and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire and fatten a lazy body or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport than to look at the finest show that light and shadow ever made among green leaves. I say to myself, when I am well out of that thicket of argument, that they are surely there, the divine people, for only we who have neither simplicity nor wisdom have denied them, and the simple of all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen them and even spoken to them.

Should we look at the spring blossoms only in full flower or the moon when cloudless and clear? Beauty is not only evident in the joyous, the loud, or the obvious. Wabi implies a stillness with an air of rising above the mundane. It's an acceptance of reality and an insight that comes with that. It allows us to realize that whatever our situation, there is beauty hiding somewhere... The feeling generated by recognizing the beauty found in simplicity... A sense of quiet contentment found away from the trappings of a materialistic world.

He walked on down the dark, empty street. Suddenly an idea came to him. Immediately, with his whole being, he knew it was true. He had glimpsed a new and improbable explanation for the atomic phenomena that up until now had seemed so hopelessly inexplicable; abysses had suddenly changed into bridges. What clarity and simplicity! This idea was astonishingly graceful and beautiful. It seemed to have given birth to itself – like a white water-lily appearing out of the calm darkness of a lake. He gasped, reveling in its beauty… And how strange, he thought suddenly, that this idea should have come to him when his mind was far away from anything to do with science, when the discussions that so excited him were those of free men, when his words and the words of his friends had been determined only by freedom, by bitter freedom.

Looking back now on the period when I wrote the books, I feel like it was a good time in my life, because I had work I needed to do, and I did it. I was perennially broke, and lonely, and anxious about money, but I also had this other thing, this part of my life which was secret and protected, and my thoughts returned to it all the time, and my feelings orbited around it, and it belonged to me completely. In a way it was like a love affair, or an infatuation, except that it only involved myself and it was all within my own control. (The opposite of a love affair, then.) For all the frustration and difficulty of writing a novel, I knew from the beginning of the process that I had been given something very important, a special gift, a blessing. It was like God had put his hand on my head and filled me with the most intense desire I had ever felt, not desire for another person, but desire to bring something into being that had never existed before. When I look back at those years, I feel touched and almost pained by the simplicity of the life I was living, because I knew what I had to do, and I did it, that was all.

After seeing the various fantastic sights, a visitor to Panorama Island would have had to gasp in amazement at this unsurpassable view. He would have had the impression that the entire island was a rose floating on the vast ocean and that the giant scarlet flower of an opium dream was conversing on an equal footing with the sun in the sky, just the two of them. What kind of strange beauty had that incomparable simplicity and grandeur created? Some travelers might have recalled the world of myth that their distant ancestors had seen. . . . How can the author describe the madness and debauchery, the pleasures of revelry and drunkenness, the numberless games of life and death that were played day and night on that magnificent stage? You readers might find something that resembled it, in part, in your most fantastic, bloodiest, and most beautiful nightmares.

You, the woman; I, the man; this, the world: And each is the work of all. There is the muffled step in the snow; the stranger; The crippled wren; the nun; the dancer; the Jesus-wing Over the walkers in the village; and there are Many beautiful arms around us and the things we know. See how those stars tramp over the heavens on their sticks Of ancient light: with what simplicity that blue Takes eternity into the quiet cave of God, where Ceasar And Socrates, like primitive paintings on a wall, Look, with idiot eyes, on the world where we two are. You, the sought for; I, the seeker; this, the search: And each is the mission of all. For greatness is only the drayhorse that coaxes The built cart out; and where we go is reason. But genius is an enormous littleness, a trickling Of heart that covers alike the hare and the hunter. How smoothly, like the sleep of a flower, love, The grassy wind moves over night's tense meadow: See how the great wooden eyes of the forrest Stare upon the architecture of our innocence. You, the village; I, the stranger; this, the road: And each is the work of all. Then, not that man do more, or stop pity; but that he be Wider in living; that all his cities fly a clean flag... We have been alone too long, love; it is terribly late For the pierced feet on the water and we must not die now. Have you ever wondered why all the windows in heaven were broken? Have you seen the homeless in the open grave of God's hand? Do you want to aquaint the larks with the fatuous music of war? There is the muffled step in the snow; the stranger; The crippled wren; the nun; the dancer; the Jesus-wing Over the walkers in the village; and there are Many desperate arms about us and the things we know.

People have seen that I intend to sweep away everything we have been taught to consider - without question - as grace and beauty; but have overlooked my work to substitute a vaster beauty, touching all objects and beings, not excluding the most despised - and because of that, all the more exhilarating.... I would like people to look at my work as an enterprise for the rehabilitation of scorned values, and, in any case, make no mistake, a work of ardent celebration.... I am convinced that any table can be for each of us a landscape as inexhaustible as the whole Andes range... I am struck by the high value, for a man, of a simple permanent fact, like the miserable vista on which the window of his room opens daily, that comes, with the passing of time, to have an important role in his life. I often think that the highest destination at which a work of art can aim is to take on that function in someone's life.

On no account would I do a picture which I should be unwilling to show to all the world - or at least all the artistic world. If I did not believe I could take pictures of all children without any lower motive than a pure love of Art, I would not ask it: and if I thought there was any fear of its lessening their beautiful simplicity of character, I would not ask it. I print all such pictures myself, and of course would not let any one see them without your permission. I fear you will reply that the one insuperable objection is "Mrs. Grundy"--that people will be sure to hear that such pictures have been done, and that they will talk. As to their hearing of it, I say "of course. All the world are welcome to hear of it, and I would not an any account suggest to the children to mention it—which would at once introduce an objectionable element"—but as to people talking about it, I will only quote the grand old monkish legend: They say: Quhat do they say? Lat them say!

The Industrial Revolution was based on two grand concepts that were profound in their simplicity. Innovators came up with ways to simplify endeavors by breaking them into easy, small tasks that could be accomplished on assembly lines. Then, beginning in the textile industry, inventors found ways to mechanize steps so that they could be performed by machines, many of them powered by steam engines. Babbage, building on ideas from Pascal and Leibniz, tried to apply these two processes to the production of computations, creating a mechanical precursor to the modern computer. His most significant conceptual leap was that such machines did not have to be set to do only one process, but instead could be programmed and reprogrammed through the use of punch cards. Ada saw the beauty and significance of that enchanting notion, and she also described an even more exciting idea that derived from it: such machines could process not only numbers but anything that could be notated in symbols.

The genius of Laplace was a perfect sledge hammer in bursting purely mathematical obstacles; but, like that useful instrument, it gave neither finish nor beauty to the results. In truth, in truism if the reader please, Laplace was neither Lagrange nor Euler, as every student is made to feel. The second is power and symmetry, the third power and simplicity; the first is power without either symmetry or simplicity. But, nevertheless, Laplace never attempted investigation of a subject without leaving upon it the marks of difficulties conquered: sometimes clumsily, sometimes indirectly, always without minuteness of design or arrangement of detail; but still, his end is obtained and the difficulty is conquered.

There is a level of consciousness between sleeping and fully wakening when the worries of the day have not settled upon us; the body is stilled, and the senses wholly receptive. If the sun is bright, there is pure silence, or the birds are beginning to sing, this shining level of consciousness can come to be the nearest we will get to paradise this side of our quietus, Every day should begin so, This is no dream. This is the reality. The world outside is beautiful. We do our best to hide it. We cover it. We push it father back. The ugliness we make ourselves. We originate our own worries. We put on our own shackles; build our prisons. We can only glimpse the golden reality, briefly, through our tiny barred windows.

The tides of time should be able to imprint the passing of the years on an object. They physical decay or natural wear and tear of the materials used does not in the least detract from the visual appeal, rather it adds to it. It is the changes of texture and colour that provide the space for the imagination to enter and become more involved with the devolution of the piece. Whereas modern design often uses inorganic materials to defy the natural ageing effects of time, wabi sabi embraces them and seeks to use this transformation as an integral part of the whole. This is not limited to the process of decay, but can also be found at the moment of inception, when life is taking its first fragile steps toward becoming.

Elegance isn't a superficial thing, it's the way mankind has found to honor life and work. That's why, when you feel uncomfortable in that position, you mustn't think that it's false or artificial: it's real and true precisely because it's difficult. That position means that both the paper and the brush feel proud of the effort you're making. The paper ceases to be a flat, colorless surface and takes on the depth of the things placed on it. Elegance is the correct posture if the writing is to be perfect. It's the same with life: when all superfluous things have been discarded, we discover simplicity and concentration. The simpler and more sober the posture, the more beautiful it will be, even though, at first, it may seem uncomfortable.

As long as this exists,” I thought, “this sunshine and this cloudless sky, and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad?” The best remedy for those who are frightened, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere they can be alone, alone with the sky, nature and God. For then and only then can you feel that everything is as it should be and that God wants people to be happy amid nature’s beauty and simplicity. As long as this exists, and that should be forever, I know that there will be solace for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances. I firmly believe that nature can bring comfort to all who suffer. Oh, who knows, perhaps it won’t be long before I can share this overwhelming feeling of happiness with someone who feels the same as I do.

O Fabricius! What would your great soul have thought, if to your own misfortune you had been called back to life and had seen the pompous face of this Rome saved by your efforts and which your honourable name had distinguished more than all its conquests? 'Gods,' you would have said, 'what has happened to those thatched roofs and those rustic dwelling places where, back then, moderation and virtue lived? What fatal splendour has succeeded Roman simplicity? What is this strange language? What are these effeminate customs? What do these statues signify, these paintings, these buildings? You mad people, what have you done? You, masters of nations, have you turned yourself into the slaves of the frivolous men you conquered? Are you now governed by rhetoricians? Was it to enrich architects, painters, sculptors, and comic actors that you soaked Greece and Asia with your blood? Are the spoils of Carthage trophies for a flute player? Romans, hurry up and tear down these amphitheatres, break up these marbles, burn these paintings, chase out these slaves who are subjugating you, whose fatal arts are corrupting you. Let other hands distinguish themselves with vain talents. The only talent worthy of Rome is that of conquering the world and making virtue reign there. When Cineas took our Senate for an assembly of kings, he was not dazzled by vain pomp or by affected elegance. He did not hear there this frivolous eloquence, the study and charm of futile men. What then did Cineas see that was so majestic? O citizens! He saw a spectacle which your riches or your arts could never produce, the most beautiful sight which has ever appeared under heaven, an assembly of two hundred virtuous men, worthy of commanding in Rome and governing the earth.

We are the sum of all people we have ever met; you change the tribe and the tribe changes you." - Fierce People Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until… in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. - Aeschylus "A man like to me, Thou shalt love be loved by forever. A hand like this hand shall throw open the gates of new life to thee!" Robert Browning "Courage is grace under pressure." Ernest Hemingway "For each new morning with its light, For rest and shelter of the night, For health and food, for love and friends, For everything Thy goodness sends." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) "To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) “Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.” ― Mahatma Gandhi “Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being. Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.” ― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching "Behind the dim unknown, standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own." James Russel Lowell "My God, my Father, and my friend. Do not forsake me in the end." Wentworth Dillon

Russians have, or had, a special name for smug philistinism—poshlust. Poshlism is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive. To apply the deadly label of poshlism to something is not only an aesthetic judgment but also a moral indictment. The genuine, the guileless, the good is never poshlust. It is possible to maintain that a simple, uncivilized man is seldom if ever a poshlust since poshlism presupposes the veneer of civilization. A peasant has to become a townsman in order to become vulgar. A painted necktie has to hide the honest Adam's apple in order to produce poshlism. It is possible that the term itself has been so nicely devised by Russians because of the cult of simplicity and good taste in old Russia. The Russia of today, a country of moral imbeciles, of smiling slaves and poker-faced bullies, has stopped noticing poshlism because Soviet Russia is so full of its special brand, a blend of despotism and pseudo-culture; but in the old days a Gogol, a Tolstoy, a Chekhov in quest of the simplicity of truth easily distinguished the vulgar side of things as well as the trashy systems of pseudo-thought. But poshlists are found everywhere, in every country, in this country as well as in Europe—in fact poshlism is more common in Europe than here, despite our American ads.

In 2003, Meryl Streep won a career achievement César Award, the French equivalent of an Oscar. Streep’s words (my translation) acknowledged the enduring interest of French audiences in women’s lives and women’s stories: "I have always wanted to present stories of women who are rather difficult. Difficult to love, difficult to understand, difficult to look at sometimes. I am very cognizant that the French public is receptive to these complex and contradictory women. As an actress I have understood for a long time that lies are simple, seductive and often easy to pass off. But the truth—the truth is always very very very complicated, often unpleasant, nuanced or difficult to accept." In France, an actress can work steadily from her teens through old age—she can start out in stories of youthful rebellion and end up, fifty years later, a screen matriarch. And in the process, her career will end up telling the story of a life—her own life, in a sense, with the films serving, as Valeria Bruni Tedeschi puts it, as a “journal intime,” or diary, of one woman’s emotions and growth. No wonder so many French actresses are beautiful. They’re radiant with living in a cinematic culture that values them, and values them as women. And they are radiant with living in a culture—albeit one with flaws of its own—in which women are half of who decides what gets valued in the first place. Their films transcend national and language barriers and are the best vehicles for conveying the depth and range of women’s experience in our era. The gift they give us, so absent in our own movies, is a vision of life that values emotional truth, personal freedom and dignity above all and that favors complexity over simplicity, the human over the machine, maturity over callowness, true mysteries over false explanations and an awareness of mortality over a life lived in denial. In the luminous humanity of their faces and in the illuminated humanity of their characters, we discover in these actresses something much more inspiring than the blank perfection and perfect blankness of the Hollywood starlet. We discover the beauty of the real.

He would like either to overcome the wolf and become wholly man or to renounce mankind and at last to live wholly a wolf's life. It may be presumed that he has never carefully watched a real wolf. Had he done so he would have seen, perhaps, that even animals are not undivided in spirit. With them, too, the well-knit beauty of the body hides a being of manifold states and strivings. The wolf, too, has his abysses. The wolf, too, suffers. No, back to nature is a false track that leads nowhere but to suffering and despair. Harry can never turn back again and become wholly wolf, and could he do so he would find that even the wolf is not of primeval simplicity, but already a creature of manifold complexity. Even the wolf has two, and more than two, souls in his wolf's breast, and he who desires to be a wolf falls into the same forgetfulness as the man who sings: "If I could be a child once more!" He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of the return to nature and innocence and the origin of things, and has quite forgotten that these blessed children are beset with conflict and complexities and capable of all suffering.

Every culture has its own creation myth, its own cosmology. And in some respects every cosmology is true, even if I might flatter myself in assuming mine is somehow truer because it is scientific. But it seems to me that no culture, including scientific culture, has cornered the market on definitive answers when it comes to the ultimate questions. Science may couch its models in the language of mathematics and observational astronomy, while other cultures use poetry and sacrificial propitiations to defend theirs. But in the end, no one knows, at least not yet. The current flux in the state of scientific cosmology attests to this, as we watch physicists and astronomers argue over string theory and multiverses and the cosmic inflation hypothesis. Many of the postulates of modern cosmology lie beyond, or at least at the outer fringes, of what can be verified through observation. As a result, aesthetics—as reflected by the “elegance” of the mathematical models—has become as important as observation in assessing the validity of a cosmological theory. There is the assumption, sometimes explicit and sometimes not, that the universe is rationally constructed, that it has an inherent quality of beauty, and that any mathematical model that does not exemplify an underlying, unifying simplicity is to be considered dubious if not invalid on such criteria alone. This is really nothing more than an article of faith; and it is one of the few instances where science is faith-based, at least in its insistence that the universe can be understood, that it “makes sense.” It is not entirely a faith-based position, in that we can invoke the history of science to support the proposition that, so far, science has been able to make sense, in a limited way, of much of what it has scrutinized. (The psychedelic experience may prove to be an exception.)

Bethany stands in the middle of the enormous, apparently endless beach surrounded by square miles of damp sand, the surf still some hundred yards off, the light pearly and uniform, the horizon a blurry, darker grey line shading into the clouds. Turning, she sees the black-green jagged stripe of the pines behind the dunes and, beyond that, more unchanging grey sky. A kind of dizziness afflicts her – she senses her insignificance, a small two-legged homunculus in the midst of all this space, a mere speck, a tiny crawling gnat in this elemental simplicity of sand, water and sky. She squats on her haunches, worried she might fall over, and to distract herself takes out her camera and frames a shot of the beach, the sea and the packed clouds – it looks like an abstract painting. Click. It looks like an abstract painting by – what was his name? Colour-field paintings they are called, the three layers of colour-fields in this case being broad, horizontal bands of dark taupe, slate grey, nebulous tarnished silver. It is rather beautiful. She stands up, feeling equilibrium return – maybe she was hungry, and felt faint for a second or two or maybe, she wonders, maybe she has experienced an actual existential moment – an epiphany – and has seen clearly the reality of her place in the world and has felt the nothingness, the vast indifference of the universe…

This Steppenwolf of ours has always been aware of at least the Faustian two-fold nature within him. He has discovered that the one-fold of the body is not inhabited by a one-fold of the soul, and that at best he is only at the beginning of a long pilgrimage towards this ideal harmony. He would like either to overcome the wolf and become wholly man or to renounce mankind and at last to live wholly a wolf's life. It may be presumed that he has never carefully watched a real wolf. Had he done so he would have seen, perhaps, that even animals are not undivided in spirit. With them, too, the well-knit beauty of the body hides a being of manifold states and strivings. The wolf, too, has his abysses. The wolf, too, suffers. No, back to nature is a false track that leads nowhere but to suffering and despair. Harry can never turn back again and become wholly wolf, and could he do so he would find that even the wolf is not of primeval simplicity, but already a creature of manifold complexity. Even the wolf has two, and more than two, souls in his wolf's breast, and he who desires to be a wolf falls into the same forgetfulness as the man who sings: "If I could be a child once more!" He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of the return to nature and innocence and the origin of things, and has quite forgotten that these blessed children are beset with conflict and complexities and capable of all suffering. There is, in fact, no way back either to the wolf or to the child. From the very start there is no innocence and no singleness. Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. It has been thrown into the muddy stream of being and may never more swim back again to its source. The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life. Nor will suicide really solve your problem, unhappy Steppenwolf. You will, instead, embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace. This is the road that Buddha and every great man has gone, whether consciously or not, insofar as fortune favored his quest. All births mean separation from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew. The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All.

Not everytime Self Love means pampering your wants, sometimes it just means to pat your self while knowing you did the right thing by choosing the path of Patience. Sometimes it's just waking up in the morning and telling your self, you've got this. Sometimes it is as simple as a cup of coffee or a hot shower after a realy tiresome day. Sometimes it's just watching the day pass by, while you take time to assimilate your thoughts and let your mind detangle in the simplicity of literally not doing anything. Sometimes it's the urge to find a reason and purpose to carry on, to feel alive, to live. Sometimes it's watching the sunset paint in a beautiful horizon and sometimes it's just keeping awake just to catch a glimpse of the rising Sun. Sometimes it's getting drenched in the rain or simply madly crazily dancing in the rain not caring of what or who passes by. Because who knows how long you got this dance of Life. Sometimes it's pulling yourself up and letting your heart know all that happens has a reason and you don't have to know all of it. Really you don't have to have all the answers, trusting the Universe is always the Only answer. Sometimes it's just reminding yourself that you can't change the past but value what your past has taught you, that you can't write your future entirely because circumstances always play a part but you can work through your present, you can live and make your present a gift, a present that your future would feel good about. Sometimes it's just knowing that disciplining Life is never easy but that always finds the lasting smile in the end. Sometimes it's just holding on with all your Soul to know that you have done your bit, to know that somewhere someday everything will make sense. Sometimes it's just to know that goals aren't always about achieving something but to be some more of your self by truly loving your self, a little bit more each passing day. Love & Light, always - Debatrayee

All 250 + episodes to date can be found at tim.blog/ podcast and itunes.com/ timferriss Jamie Foxx on Workout Routines, Success Habits, and Untold Hollywood Stories (# 124)—tim.blog/ jamie The Scariest Navy SEAL I’ve Ever Met . . . and What He Taught Me (# 107)—tim.blog/ jocko Arnold Schwarzenegger on Psychological Warfare (and Much More) (# 60)—tim.blog/ arnold Dom D’Agostino on Fasting, Ketosis, and the End of Cancer (# 117)—tim.blog/ dom2 Tony Robbins on Morning Routines, Peak Performance, and Mastering Money (# 37)—tim.blog/ tony How to Design a Life—Debbie Millman (# 214)—tim.blog/ debbie Tony Robbins—On Achievement Versus Fulfillment (# 178)—tim.blog/ tony2 Kevin Rose (# 1)—tim.blog/ kevinrose [If you want to hear how bad a first episode can be, this delivers. Drunkenness didn’t help matters.] Charles Poliquin on Strength Training, Shredding Body Fat, and Increasing Testosterone and Sex Drive (# 91)—tim.blog/ charles Mr. Money Mustache—Living Beautifully on $ 25–27K Per Year (# 221)—tim.blog/ mustache Lessons from Warren Buffett, Bobby Fischer, and Other Outliers (# 219)—tim.blog/ buffett Exploring Smart Drugs, Fasting, and Fat Loss—Dr. Rhonda Patrick (# 237)—tim.blog/ rhonda 5 Morning Rituals That Help Me Win the Day (# 105)—tim.blog/ rituals David Heinemeier Hansson: The Power of Being Outspoken (# 195)—tim.blog/ dhh Lessons from Geniuses, Billionaires, and Tinkerers (# 173)—tim.blog/ chrisyoung The Secrets of Gymnastic Strength Training (# 158)—tim.blog/ gst Becoming the Best Version of You (# 210)—tim.blog/ best The Science of Strength and Simplicity with Pavel Tsatsouline (# 55)—tim.blog/ pavel Tony Robbins (Part 2) on Morning Routines, Peak Performance, and Mastering Money (# 38)—tim.blog/ tony How Seth Godin Manages His Life—Rules, Principles, and Obsessions (# 138)—tim.blog/ seth The Relationship Episode: Sex, Love, Polyamory, Marriage, and More (with Esther Perel) (# 241)—tim.blog/ esther The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency—Nick Szabo (# 244)—tim.blog/ crypto Joshua Waitzkin (# 2)—tim.blog/ josh The Benevolent Dictator of the Internet, Matt Mullenweg (# 61)—tim.blog/ matt Ricardo Semler—The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules (# 229)—tim.blog/ ricardo

One could understand feminism generally as an attack on woman as she was under “patriarchy” (that concept is a social construction of feminism). The feminine mystique was her ideal; in regard to sex, it consisted of women’s modesty and in the double standard of sexual conduct that comes with it, which treated women’s misbehavior as more serious than men’s. Instead of trying to establish a single standard by bringing men up to the higher standard of women, as with earlier feminism, today’s feminism decided to demand that women be entitled to sink to the level of men. It bought into the sexual revolution of the late sixties and required that women be rewarded with the privileges of male conquest rather than, say, continue serving as camp followers of rock bands. The result has been the turn for the worse. ... What was there in feminine modesty that the feminists left behind? In return for women’s holding to a higher standard of sexual behavior, feminine modesty gave them protection while they considered whether they wanted to consent. It gave them time: Not so fast! Not the first date! I’m not ready for that! It gave them the pleasure of being courted along with the advantage of looking before you leap. To win over a woman, men had to strive to express their finer feelings, if they had any. Women could judge their character and choose accordingly. In sum, women had the right of choice, if I may borrow that slogan. All this and more was social construction, to be sure, but on the basis of the bent toward modesty that was held to be in the nature of women. That inclination, it was thought, cooperated with the aggressive drive in the nature of men that could be beneficially constructed into the male duty to take the initiative. There was no guarantee of perfection in this arrangement, but at least each sex would have a legitimate expectation of possible success in seeking marital happiness. They could live together, have children, and take care of them. Without feminine modesty, however, women must imitate men, and in matters of sex, the most predatory men, as we have seen. The consequence is the hook-up culture now prevalent on college campuses, and off-campus too (even more, it is said). The purpose of hooking up is to replace the human complexity of courtship with “good sex,” a kind of animal simplicity, eliminating all the preliminaries to sex as well as the aftermath. “Good sex,” by the way, is in good part a social construction of the alliance between feminists and male predators that we see today. It narrows and distorts the human potentiality for something nobler and more satisfying than the bare minimum. The hook-up culture denounced by conservatives is the very same rape culture denounced by feminists. Who wants it? Most college women do not; they ignore hookups and lament the loss of dating. Many men will not turn down the offer of an available woman, but what they really want is a girlfriend. The predatory males are a small minority among men who are the main beneficiaries of the feminist norm. It’s not the fault of men that women want to join them in excess rather than calm them down, for men too are victims of the rape culture. Nor is it the fault of women. Women are so far from wanting hook-ups that they must drink themselves into drunken consent — in order to overcome their natural modesty, one might suggest. Not having a sociable drink but getting blind drunk is today’s preliminary to sex. Beautifully romantic, isn’t it?

There once was a female snake that roamed around a small village in the countryside of Egypt. She was commonly seen by villagers with her small baby as they grazed around the trees. One day, several men noticed the mother snake was searching back and forth throughout the village in a frenzy — without her young. Apparently, her baby had slithered off on its own to play while she was out looking for food. Yet the mother snake went on looking for her baby for days because it still hadn't returned back to her. So one day, one of the elder women in the village caught sight of the big snake climbing on top of their water supply — an open clay jug harvesting all the village's water. The snake latched its teeth on the big jug's opening and sprayed its venom into it. The woman who witnessed the event was mentally handicapped, so when she went to warn the other villagers, nobody really understood what she was saying. And when she approached the jug to try to knock it over, she was reprimanded by her two brothers and they locked her away in her room. Then early the next day, the mother snake returned to the village after a long evening searching for her baby. The children villagers quickly surrounded her while clapping and singing because she had finally found her baby. And as the mother snake watched the children rejoice in the reunion with her child, she suddenly took off straight for the water supply — leaving behind her baby with the villagers' children. Before an old man could gather some water to make some tea, she hissed in his direction, forcing him to step back as she immediately wrapped herself around the jug and squeezed it super hard. When the jug broke burst into a hundred fragments, she slithered away to gather her child and return to the safety of her hole. Many people reading this true story may not understand that the same feelings we are capable of having, snakes have too. Thinking the villagers killed her baby, the mother snake sought out revenge by poisoning the water to destroy those she thought had hurt her child. But when she found her baby and saw the villagers' children, her guilt and protective instincts urged her to save them before other mothers would be forced to experience the pain and grief of losing a child. Animals have hearts and minds too. They are capable of love, hatred, jealousy, revenge, hunger, fear, joy, and caring for their own and others. We look at animals as if they are inferior because they are savage and not civilized, but in truth, we are the ones who are not being civil by drawing a thick line between us and them — us and nature. A wild animal's life is very straightforward. They spend their time searching and gathering food, mating, building homes, and meditating and playing with their loved ones. They enjoy the simplicity of life without any of our technological gadgetry, materialism, mass consumption, wastefulness, superficiality, mindless wars, excessive greed and hatred. While we get excited by the vibrations coming from our TV sets, headphones and car stereos, they get stimulated by the vibrations of nature. So, just because animals may lack the sophisticated minds to create the technology we do or make brick homes and highways like us, does not mean their connections to the etheric world isn't more sophisticated than anything we could ever imagine. That means they are more spiritual, reflective, cosmic, and tuned into alternate universes beyond what our eyes can see. So in other words, animals are more advanced than us. They have the simple beauty we lack and the spiritual contentment we may never achieve.