Quotes About Simplicity

The goal is to minimize the amount of a program you have to think about at any one time. You might think of this as mental juggling—the more mental balls the program requires you to keep in the air at once, the more likely you'll drop one of the balls, leading to a design or coding error.

Reduce complexity. The single most important reason to create a routine is to reduce a program's complexity. Create a routine to hide information so that you won't need to think about it.

Beyond that box camera he saw in a shop window in Chicago in seventh grade, Dad has never wanted anything, as far as I know. He still coos over the tennis balls and Old Spice we give him every birthday, Father's Day, and Christmas. And yet he understands the symbolic power that an earned object holds.

In those days, tired of buying him tennis balls and socks and Old Spice for his birthday, we annually asked Dad if there wasn't anything else he would like. And he always said the same thing. He gathered us to his side—Amy and The Boys; one redhead and four shitheads—and told us that he already had everything he ever wanted. The car is just a box to keep it in.

I dream of a simple church marked by the simple proposition that we are "otherly.

What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.

Einstein once remarked to his assistant that "what I'm really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all.

But the world had its layers. To the simple it offered simplicity. To the wise it offered profundity. And the only measure of courage worth acknowledging was found in accepting where one stood in that scheme—in hard, unwavering honesty, no matter how humbling.

I would have liked to invent the plain white shirt, with a skirt and pants to go with it.

All I really want to be is boring. When people talk about me, I'd like them to say, Carol's basically a short Bill Bradley. Or, Carol's kind of like Al Gore in a skirt.

Slack is gratifying to work on in the same way that Flickr was. The mission is to make people's working lives simpler, more pleasant, more productive.

I like to look nice when I go out and I'll put on a bit of slap, but I'm not someone who spends hours looking at myself. I live on a farm in Devon and when I look in the mirror I can see my garden behind me. That's what I'm really interested in.

I grew up in Appalachia, and I've seen people milk cows and slaughter pigs and plow with a big-footed horse. It's not like I was a city child.

I sleep early and I don't party.

Becoming a father, I think it inevitably changes your perspective of life. I don't get nearly enough sleep. And the simplest things in life are completely satisfying. I find you don't have to do as much, like you don't go on as many outings.

I think people want very much to simplify their lives enough so that they can control the things that make it possible to sleep at night.

I prefer clothes that are simple, well-cut, but with one major extravagance. Something with the sleeves, with the skirt, but nothing too fussy, too flashy.

I shaved my hair. I wore robes. I slept on the floor. We meditated for four to eight hours a day.

I knew what I wanted to wear and I couldn't find it: I wanted that delicate jewelry that you never took off, that you showered in, that you slept in.

It is always better to be slightly underdressed.

Everybody that loves Nancy loves it in a slightly condescending way. Nancy is comics reduced to their most elemental level.

Give me a mystery - just a plain and simple one - a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little bare-foot mystery: give me a mystery - just one!

Baseball is the favorite American sport because it's so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.

Maybe I'm just a slow learner or something, but I like to have things laid out as plainly and simply as possible.