Simple Solution Quotes

“But here's the rub of addiction. By its nature, people afflicted are unable to do what, from the outside, appears to be a simple solution-don't drink. Don't use drugs. In exchange for that one small sacrifice, you will be given a gift that other terminally ill people would give anything for: life.”

— David Sheff

“For any given problem, if there's a simple solution it will already have been applied. So, perhaps, the solution isn't as simple as you think.”

— Stuart Aken

“At its most basic, the logic of 'meritocracy' is ironclad: putting the most qualified, best equipped people into the positions of greates responsibility and import ... But my central contention is that our near-religious fidelity to the meritocratic model comes with huge costs. We overestimate the advantages of meritocracy and underappreciate its costs, because we don't think hard enough about the consequences of the inequality it produces. As Americans, we take it as a given that unequal levels of achievement are natural, even desirable. Sociologist Jermole Karabel, whose work looks at elite formation, once said he 'didnt think any advanced democracy is as obsessed with equality of opportunity or as relatively unconcerned with equality of condition' as the United States. This is our central problem. And my proposed solution for correcting the excesses of our extreme version of meritocracy is quite simple: make America more equal”

— Christopher L. Hayes

“To every problem, there is a most simple solution.”

— Agatha Christie

“If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used-if necessary, terror, slaughter.”

— Isaiah Berlin

“As the man said, for every complex problem there's a simple solution, and it's wrong.”

— Umberto Eco

“His (Claude Legrand's) method is founded in a simple directive: Don't conclude that the problem as it's first presented, or as you first perceive it, is indeed the actual problem. If you do, and you've got it wrong, the solution you produce may also be wrong. The first step to figuring out what your problem is, Legrand says, is to deconstruct it by questioning it.”

— Amanda Lang

“The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.”

— Werner Heisenberg

“Whatever it was that had drawn him to police work, that had wed him to the job for so many years, it surely wasn't the appeal of a gun or the deceptively simple solution it offers.”

— John Verdon

“If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud's interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation. It did not survive the failure of all his adult relationships. He had always treated poems as a form of private communication. He gave his songs to chansonniers, his satires to satirists. Without a constant companion, he was writing in a void.”

— Graham Robb

“The reasons leading to the origin of the problem aren't always simple, but the solution always is.”

— Jamie McGuire

“Selfish needs, wants, and desires needed to be obliterated. Greed, overindulgence, and gluttony had to be expunged from human behavior. The solution was in self-control, in minimalism, in sparse living conditions; one simple and a brand-new dictionary filled with words everyone would understand.”

— Tahereh Mafi

“Buddhist philosophy is an interpretation of ordinary human experience, but an interpretation which is not revealed by God nor discovered in the access of inspiration nor seen in a mystical light. Basically, Buddhist metaphysics is a very simple and natural elaboration of the implications of Buddha's own experience of enlightenment. Buddhism does not seek primarily to understand or to "believe in" the enlightenment of Buddha as the solution to all human problems, but seeks an existential and empirical participation in that enlightenment experience. It is conceivable that one might have the "enlightenment" without being aware of any discursive philosophical implications at all.”

— Thomas Merton

“When you can't cope with change, you feel overwhelmed, and you look for a simple solution.”

— Klaus Schwab

“Man of simple life envies the man of complex life and man of complex life envies the man of simple life! The solution is simple: Let them taste the lives they envy. And thus the envy will disappear; it will replace with the truth!”

— Mehmet Murat Ildan

“The simple solution: do more, think less.”

— Marty Rubin

“Doing the simple thing first doesn't mean your solution will work forever.”

— Mike Krieger

“History is a litany of injustice, no one denies it. But when has a simple solution ever been anything but evil? Only in complexity do we find answers. Through complexity men struggle towards fairness; it is slow and clumsy, but it's the only way. Simplicity demands too great a sacrifice. It always has. - Lestat”

— Anne Rice

“No anesthetic was necessary for the people who ordered the killings; they had the misleading language of technocratic bureaucracy to distance them from the killings. Thus "mass murder" becomes "the final solution," "world domination" becomes "defending the free world," the War Department becomes the Department of Defense, and "ecocide" becomes "developing natural resources." No one needs to get drunk to do any of this. A good strong ideology and heavy doses of rationalization are all it takes. But it may require little more than a simple unwillingness to step outside the flow of society, to think and act and most importantly experience for ourselves-and to make our own decisions.”

— Derrick Jensen

“For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the "riddles of the universe," or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man.”

— Hannah Arendt

“The struggle against poverty in the world and the challenge of cutting wealthy country emissions all has a single, very simple solution ... Here it is: Put a price on carbon.”

— Al Gore

“You know if the U.S. Government wanted to boost the economy there's a simple solution make Black Friday the refund date for your state and federal taxes”

— Stanley Victor Paskavich

“The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution. Some day we shall be amazed. As the human race mounts upward, the deep layers emerge naturally from the zone of distress. The obliteration of misery will be accomplished by a simple elevation of level.”

— Victor Hugo

“With our limited senses and consciousness, we only glimpse a small portion of reality. Furthermore, everything in the universe is in a state of constant flux. Simple words and thoughts cannot capture this flux or complexity. The only solution for an enlightened person is to let the mind absorb itself in what it experiences, without having to form a judgment on what it all means. The mind must be able to feel doubt and uncertainty for as long as possible. As it remains in this state and probes deeply into the mysteries of the universe, ideas will come that are more dimensional and real than if we had jumped to conclusions and formed judgments early on.”

— Robert Greene

“It turns out to be very difficult to devise a theory to describe the universe all in one go. Instead, we break the problem up into bits and invent a number of partial theories. Each of these partial theories describes and predicts a certain limited class of observations, neglecting the effects of other quantities, or representing them by simple sets of numbers. It may be that this approach is completely wrong. If everything in the universe depends on everything else in a fundamental way, it might be impossible to get close to a full solution by investigating parts of the problem in isolation. Nevertheless, it is certainly the way that we have made progress in the past.”

— Stephen Hawking

“Kafir, you have a very complicated problem with a very simple solution.”

— John Green

“The principals are quite simple. We can love people who treat us well. We cannot love people who treat us badly because, treating someone badly is not a virtue and we can only love virtue. I don't think that's controversial. I mean, there is no marriage therapist that I can imagine in the world who would say to a woman being beaten, humiliated, verbally abused, or completely ignored by her husband, "You just need to love him more. You need to work at making him happier." That would be sadistic in the extreme to say to someone.
So, in the same way I say, if anyone, I don't care if they are your priest, god, father, mother, or your Siamese twin cousin coming out of your elbow or ass. I don't care. If someone is treating you badly, that is not good for you. The solution is not you being so great that you both become better. That's not a realistic solution.”

— Stefan Molyneux

“Katar," Raoden called.
Yes, My Lord?"
Do you know what it is? The secret, I mean?"
Kahar smiled. "I havent't been hungry in days, my lord. It is the most amazing feeling in the world-I don't evern notice the pain anymore." Raoden nodded, and Kahar left. The man had come looking for a magical solution to his woes, but he had found an answer much more simple. Pain lost its power when other things became more importan. Kahar didn't need a potion or an Aon to save him-he just needed something to do.”

— Brandon Sanderson

“A designer can mull over complicated designs for months. Then suddenly the simple, elegant, beautiful solution occurs to him. When it happens to you, it feels as if God is talking! And maybe He is.”

— Leo Frankowski

“It's a simple solution. You change one thing, and suddenly you've changed everything.”

— Rebecca Onie

“The designer ... has a passion for doing something that fits somebody's needs, but that is not just a simple fix. The designer has a dream that goes beyond what exists, rather than fixing what exists ... the designer wants to create a solution that fits in a deeper situational or social sense.”

— David E. Kelley

“It's very satisfying to take a problem we thought difficult and find a simple solution. The best solutions are always simple.”

— Ivan Sutherland

“He loved numbers, their patterns and secrets, the way something complex could be reduced to something simple. In mathematics, unlike life, there was always a solution, a definite answer.”

— Lisa Kleypas

“Let's turn now to the citation of authors, found in other books and missing in yours. The solution to this is very simple, because all you have to do is find a book that cites them all from A to Z, as you put it. Then you'll put that same alphabet in your book, and though the lie is obvious it doesn't matter, since you'll have little need to use them; perhaps someone will be naive enough to believe you have consulted all of them in your plain and simple history; if it serves no other purpose, at least a lengthy catalogue of authors will give the book an unexpected authority. Furthermore, no one will try to determine if you followed them or did not follow them, having nothing to gain from that.”

— Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

“A solemn state of mind is never crude or simple-it seems to contain a certain measure of its own opposite in solution. A solemn joy preserves a sort of bitter in its sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent.”

— William James

“What I have learned from the teachers with whom I have worked is that, just as there is no simple solution to the arms race, there is no simple answer to how to work with children in the classroom. It is a matter of being present as a whole person, with your own thoughts and feelings, and of accepting children as whole people, with their own thoughts and feelings. It's a matter of working very hard to find out what those thoughts and feelings are, as a starting point for developing a view of a world in which people are as much concerned about other people security as they are about their own”

— Eleanor Duckworth

“For every problem, there exists a simple and elegant solution which is absolutely wrong.”

— Ellet J. Waggoner

“A young pregnant wife has been hospitalized for a simple attack of appendicitis. The doctors had to apply ice to her stomach and when the treatments ended the doctors suggested that she abort the child, they told her it was the 'best solution' because the baby would be born with some disability but the young brave wife decided not to abort, and the child was born. That woman was my Mother and I was the child.”

— Andrea Bocelli

“Earth magic can help to sort out, work through and solve many of the minor crises and problems facing us as individuals today. True, it is not a simple solution to the world's problems, but it can bring order into our lives, and that's a good start.”

— Scott Cunningham

“If I have positions going against me, I get right out; if they are going for me, I keep them Risk control is the most important thing in trading. If you have a losing position that is making you uncomfortable, the solution is very simple: Get out, because you can always get back in.”

— Paul Tudor Jones

“'I need milk' and 'I need to decide whether to buy this company' both tie up space in psychic RAM. The solution is simple. Write it down. Look at it. Do it or say to yourself 'not now'.”

— David Allen

“The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seekthe simple solution.”

— Anton Chekhov

“Right and wrong as moral principles do not change. They are applicable and reliable determinants whether the situations with which we deal are simple or complicated. There is always a right and wrong to every question which requires our solution.”

— Ezra Taft Benson

“The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities.”

— Sylvia Plath

“The solution to the problems of marriage and parenting is simple. Spend more time with the people you care about the most.”

— Brian Tracy

“The simple solution for disappointment depression Get up and get moving. Physically move. Do. Act. Get going.”

— Peter McWilliams

“Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.”

— H.L. Mencken

“There's a simple solution to our traffic problems. We'll have business build the roads, and government build the cars.”

— Will Rogers

“For the lesson of such stories [of resistance to Nazi atrocities] is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not , just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere . Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”

— Hannah Arendt

“The problem of aging is the problem of living. There is no simple solution.”

— Coco Chanel