Our life is frittered away by detail.

An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers or in extreme cases, he may add his ten toes and lump the rest.

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 thumbnail.

In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand and one items to be allowed for that man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.

Simplify, simplify.

- Henry David Thoreau

Eschew complexification! Shun sesquipedalianism! Grammatify straightforwardly!

What complexity is not, is an aid to understanding.

The hypocrisy of Thoreau's statement is self-evident. If he really believed what it was he was saying, he would have just said:


Simplify.

Thus endeth the lesson.

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