Simplification Quotes

1. "The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situations. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help is, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted."
Author: Aldous Huxley

2. "In my opinion, a master is morally obliged to seize every sort of opportunity and to try to solve the problems of the position without fear of some simplifications."
Author: Alexander Alekhine

3. "There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them."
Author: Anne Morrow Lindbergh

4. "The underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us..."
Author: Barack Obama

5. "The long procession from Jesus' healing of the blind to Franklin's bifocals took a substantial thinning of powers; time has not been so generous in delaying an attenuated aid to the heavy-lidded. Being past the time of miracles, even gadgets are now too external to modify our afflictions of vision; a drug is necessary to ease our senses into becoming receptive to grace. Truth no longer free to bypass the laws of physics or wait for us to tamper with them, it flashes itself before us in bursts brief enough for our attention spans to linger on its appearance. Not only the conversion of a nation to Belief, but its resilience in the face of decline, should make a simplification to miracles once again necessary."
Author: Bauvard

6. "Modern man has a need for simplification that tends to find its expression one way or another. And this artificial monotony which he takes pains to create, this monotony which is slowly taking over the world, this monotony is the sign of our greatness. It bears the mark of a certain will-power, the will to utility; it is the expression of utility, a law that governs all our modern activity: the Law of Utility."
Author: Blaise Cendrars

7. "The motorization of law into mere decree was not yet the culmination of simplifications and accelerations. New accelerations were produced by market regulations and state control of the economy —with their numerous and transferable authorizations and subauthorizations to various offices, associations and commissions concerned with economic decisions. Thus in Germany, the concept of "directive" appeared next to the concept of "decree." This was "the elastic form of legislation," surpassing the decree in terms of speed and simplicity. Whereas the decree was called a "motorized law," the directive became a "motorized decree." Here independent, purely positivist jurisprudence lost its freedom of maneuver. Law became a means of planning, an administrative act, a directive."
Author: Carl Schmitt

8. "Simplification is as much in the mind as it is in the device."
Author: Donald A. Norman

9. "24. O sancta simplicitas! In what strange simplification and falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering when once one has got eyes for beholding this marvel! How we have made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple!"
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

10. "I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

11. "Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx's investigations. It is not the ‘belief' in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred' book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. It is the conviction, moreover, that all attempts to surpass or ‘improve' it have led and must lead to over-simplification, triviality and eclecticism."
Author: György Lukács

12. "The elevation of ends and the simplification of means is the goal."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

13. "My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colors. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details."
Author: Joan Miro

14. "But when Christopher mentioned that he and Talbott had been trying to package post-Cold War policy in a single phrase, Kennan said they shouldn't. "Containment" had been a misleading oversimplification; strategy could not be made to fit a "bumper sticker." The president laughed when Talbott told him what had happened: "that's why Kennan's a great diplomat and scholar but not a politician."
Author: John Lewis Gaddis

15. "It was not just a touch, an action. It was a simplification of both of them: They were no longer Noah Czerny and Blue Sargent. They were now just him and her. Not even that. They were only the time that they held between them."
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

16. "Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification."
Author: Martin Henry Fischer

17. "Every new step in the direction of simplification – toward monoculture, say, ore genetically identical plants – leads to unimaginable new complexities.(intended as challenges)"
Author: Michael Pollan

18. "Our ignorance of the teeming wilderness that is the soil (even the act of regarding it as a wilderness) is no impediment to nurturing it. To the contrary, a healthy sense of all we don't know--even a sense of mystery--keeps us from reaching for oversimplifications and technological silver bullets."
Author: Michael Pollan

19. "And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification."
Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

20. "The simplification of life is one of the steps to inner peace. A persistent simplification will create an inner and outer well-being that places harmony in one's life."
Author: Peace Pilgrim

21. "Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep ordinary person on course."
Author: Reinhold Niebuhr

22. "But what is striking about this, in a town that often talks about tax cuts, we could quite easily, Republicans and Democrats working together, do something that everybody in America desires, and that is a simplification of our Tax Code."
Author: Richard Neal

23. "It is easy to talk about tax simplification, and we all know it is very difficult to accomplish; but for the last three Congresses, I have offered a tax simplification bill that would include a paid-for repeal of alternative minimum tax."
Author: Richard Neal

24. "Only with the greatest of simplifications, for the sake of convenience, can we say Africa. In reality, except as a geographical term, Africa doesn't exist."
Author: Ryszard Kapuściński

25. "The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say 'Africa'. In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist."
Author: Ryszard Kapuściński

26. "Here's a simplification of everything I'm going through: You + Me is bad news."
Author: Sara Bareilles

27. "It is of course no secret to contemporary philosophers and psychologists that man himself is changing in our violent century, under the influence, of course, not only of war and revolution, but also of practically everything else that lays claim to being "modern" and "progressive." We have already cited the most striking forms of Nihilist Vitalism, whose cumulative effect has been to uproot, disintegrate, and "mobilize" the individual, to substitute for his normal stability and rootedness a senseless quest for power and movement, and to replace normal human feeling by a nervous excitability. The work of Nihilist Realism, in practice as in theory, has been parallel and complementary to that of Vitalism: a work of standardization, specialization, simplification, mechanization, dehumanization; its effect has been to "reduce" the individual to the most "Primitive" and basic level, to make him in fact the slave of his environment, the perfect workman in Lenin's worldwide "factory."
Author: Seraphim Rose

28. "Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been pronounced, by himself, not culpable."
Author: Stanisław Lem

29. "Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject."
Author: Thomas Mann

30. "Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing... layout, processes, and procedures."
Author: Tom Peters

31. "The good must be clearly good but not wholly clear. If it is wholly clear it is too easy to reject.What is wanted is an oversimplification, a reduction of a multitude of possibilities to only two. But if the recommended path were utterly devoid of mystery, it would cease to fascinate men….There would be nothing left to discuss and interpret, to lecture and write about, to admire and merely think about.The world exacts a price for calling teachers wise: it keeps discussing the paths they recommend, but few men follow them. The wise give men endless opportunities to discuss what is good."
Author: Walter Kaufmann

32. "I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction."
Author: Zadie Smith

Simplification Quotes Pictures