Quotes About Simplicity

Speak in extremes, it'll save you time.

Bad design is the default mode, since it takes the least effort to create.

Musicians sort of knew this already—that the emotional center is not the technical center, that funky grooves are not square, and what sounds like a simple beat can either be sensuous or simply a metronomic timekeeper, depending on the player.

Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects.

The classical players who think all popular music is simple tend not to hear the nuances involved, so naturally they can't play very well in that style. Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects. When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that's when the details take on larger meanings.

Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects. When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that's when the details take on larger meanings.

Stop making sense

To paraphrase one of my favorite math professors: The difference between great artists, and artists who are not so great, is that great artists think deeply about simple things.

Loneliness is the price you pay for keeping things uncomplicated

Okay, listen up! Clear your desk...NOW! Despite what some people believe, a cluttered desk does not indicate genius. Au contraire! It signals confusion and creates stress. Even mini-clutter will grow and eventually fill every inch. Keep your desk clear of everything except your project du jour and your family picture. 22

The poet Mary Rose O'Reilly describes the process aptly: "People all over the world are doing very hard things—turning the other cheek, giving all they have to the poor, eating potatoes without salt—because some confused and yawning student took a note.

Good/bad explanation An explanation that is hard/easy to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for.

The reason why higher-level subjects can be studied at all is that under special circumstances the stupendously complex behaviour of vast numbers of particles resolves itself into a measure of simplicity and comprehensibility. This is called emergence: high-level simplicity 'emerges' from low-level complexity.

I don't need my phone to play me music. I need it to be a phone and an e-mail thing.

I just spend my money on the essentials. Just basically food and shelter.

Efficiency is intelligent laziness.

We can now see that the alternative to "preoccupation" and racing around in a flurry of busyness is learning how to live more deeply.

The simplicity of it was disconcerting: a simplicity that made all the other dates they'd had before baffling, those times they'd had to talk or try to be amusing, make an effort to seem like a worthwhile person. The obviousness of it became almost laughable.

Humans are always looking for explanations. I'm not interested in them. Is that food over there? Is there water over the hill? Where is there shade from the midday sun and a warm rock to rest on at night? These are the important questions.

Economics [...] has the advantage of joining an extremely simple model of human nature with extremely complicated mathematical formulae that non-specialists can rarely understand, much less criticize.

For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong. — H. L. Mencken (slightly rephrased)

In California in general, and its northwest corner in particular, the central role of money in indigenous societies was combined with a cultural emphasis on thrift and simplicity, a disapproval of wasteful pleasures, and a glorification of work that – according to Goldschmidt – bore an uncanny resemblance to the Puritan attitudes described by Max Weber in his famous 1905 essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.

Talk of joy there may be things better than beef stew and baked potatoes and home-made bread -- there may be.