A Quote by Anne-Therese de Marguenat de Courcelles

Simplicity is oftenest an adroit pretence.

Anne-Therese de Marguenat de Courcelles

Quote Topics

Pretence Simplicity

Quote Author

Anne-Therese de Marguenat de Courcelles
French - Writer
1647 - July 12, 1733

Adroit geo-strategists take new realities into account as they try to imagine how global politics will unfold. In the foreign policy business, however, inertia is a powerful force and 'adroit' a little-known concept.

Stephen Kinzer

Great events ever depend but upon a single hair. The adroit man profits by everything, neglects nothing which can increase his chances; the less adroit, by sometimes disregarding a single chance, fails in everything.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Experience proves that those are oftenest abused who can be abused with the greatest impunity. Men are whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest.

Frederick Douglass

When you find me attempting to break into your house to take your plate, under any pretence whatsoever, but most of all under pretence of purity of religion and Christian charity shoot me for a robber and a hypocrite, as in that case I shall certainly be.

Edmund Burke

The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine. The simplicity of nature is not that which may be easily read but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Simplicity. Simplicity. Simplicity. The three keys to a spiritual life.

Tom Shadyac

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity - I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly.

Plato

Simplicity and purity are the two wings by which a man is lifted above all earthly things. Simplicity is in the intention - purity in the affection. Simplicity tends to God, - purity apprehends and tastes Him.

Thomas a Kempis

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.

Henry David Thoreau

The art of art, the glory of expression, is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity, and the sunlight of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity-nothing can make up for excess, or for the lack of definiteness.

Walt Whitman

When we are truly in this interior simplicity our whole appearance is franker, more natural. This true simplicity. . . makes us conscious of a certain openness, gentleness, innocence, gaiety, and serenity. O, how amiable this simplicity is! Who will give it to me? I leave all for this. It is the pearl of the Gospel.

Francois Fenelon

The simplicity that all this presupposes is not easy to attain. I find that my life constantly threatens to become complex and divisive. A life of prayer is basically a very simple life. This simplicity, however, is the result of asceticism and effort: it is not a spontaneous simplicity.

Thomas Merton

Certainly each side - the 'absolutists' and the 'constructivists' or 'humanists', as I've labelled them - accuses the other of hubris, and lays claim to humility. I see hubris on both sides: a pretence that we could ascend to an objective account of the world, on the one hand, and a pretence that we have the resources to live and act without a sense of there being something to which we answerable, on the other. So both sides are 'villains'.

David E. Cooper

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!

Henry David Thoreau

Thanks, oftenest obtrusive.