Echoes

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

Man knows much more than he understands.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

Men do not stumble over mountains, but over molehills

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it.

The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.

He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.

It is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched. Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would be almost easy to live. And M. Sartre's hero does not perhaps give us the real meaning of his anguish when he insists on those aspects of man he finds repugnant, instead of basing his reasons for despair on certain of man's signs of greatness. The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.

Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

The adjective hasn't yet been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

What speaks to the soul escapes our measurements.

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

Nature is to be found in her entirety nowhere more than in her smallest creatures.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a new star.

The Tao is like a bellows: it is empty yet infinitely capable. The more you use it, the more it produces; the more you talk of it, the less you understand.

In the great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation.

Many things which nature makes difficult become easy to the man who uses his brains.

In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.