Life & Wisdom Quote by Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Simplicity, Gerould implies, isn’t some Edenic default we return to when the rules relax; it’s a discipline we have to learn the hard way. The line turns a comforting modern fantasy on its head: that freedom naturally produces clarity, minimalism, and “less but better.” In her view, unregulated humans don’t streamline. They elaborate. They decorate. They invent procedures, hierarchies, etiquette, paperwork, traditions, and moral algebra - not always because power forces them to, but because complexity feels like meaning.

The first sentence is the bait: “an acquired taste” borrows the language of snobs and gourmands, suggesting simplicity is like black coffee or modern art - initially unpleasant, later aspirational. It’s a quiet jab at self-help pieties. If simplicity must be acquired, then our first impulses run the other way: toward cluttered calendars, overbuilt systems, baroque explanations. Gerould’s second sentence delivers the sharper claim: “left free” doesn’t redeem us; it exposes our instinct to thicken life with extra steps and symbolic burdens.

Context matters. Writing in the early 20th century, Gerould watched modernity accelerate: industrial abundance, expanding bureaucracy, new social codes, more consumer choice. Freedom arrived alongside gadgets, organizations, and ideologies that multiplied decisions rather than reducing them. Her subtext is skeptical but not purely anti-modern: complexity isn’t just oppression; it’s also a human hobby, a form of self-authorship. The sting is that simplicity requires intention - a kind of moral and aesthetic resistance - because our default setting is to make a maze and then call it civilization.