Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values.... God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.

The remark contrasts elemental, bodily contact with nature (“feel the earth”) with the abstractions and artifices of modern life. Lindbergh suggests that self-knowledge and a stable moral compass arise from direct experience of the natural world—work, weather, soil, seasons—rather than from social status, technology, or ideology. The second sentence frames “simplicity” as a divine or natural order and casts human beings as the agents of needless complication: we multiply wants, systems, and distractions until we lose sight of basic values. Read together, the lines function as a critique of modernity and a call to recover humility, limits, and grounded living as prerequisites for ethical clarity.