Simplification Quotes - Page 2

• Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

  Alain de Botton

  Memories, Anticipation, Instruments

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• Intellectuals ... regard over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations.

  Aldous Huxley

  Mind, Use, Unqualified

  Aldous Huxley, Robert S. Baker, James Sexton (2002). “Complete Essays: 1956-1963, and supplement, 1920-1948”, Ivan R. Dee Publisher

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• If western culture is shown to be rich it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to "dissolve" harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.

  Umberto Eco

  Mind, Enlightenment, Western Culture

  "The roots of conflict" by Umberto Eco, www.theguardian.com. October 13, 2001.

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• All the above is, of course, a gross simplification. There are deeper reasons to travel - itches and tickles on the underbelly of the unconscious mind. We go where we need to go, and then try to figure out what we're doing there.

  Jeff Greenwald

  Travel, Mind, Trying

  Jeff Greenwald (2014). “Shopping for Buddhas: An Adventure in Nepal”, p.13, Travelers' Tales

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• I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.

  C. S. Lewis

  Believe, Buddhism, Islam

  Letter to Sheldon Vanauken on December 14, 1950. "Sleuthing C.S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands". Book by Kathryn Ann Lindskoog, p. 393, 2001.

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• The labeling of nociceptors as pain fibers was not an admirable simplification, but an unfortunate trivialization under the guise of simplification.

  Patrick David Wall

  Pain, Fiber, Injury

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• In the first round of work simplification...you can reasonably expect a 30 to 50 percent reduction...To implement the actual simplification, you must question why each step is performed. Typically, you will find that many steps exist in your work flow for no good reason. Often they are there by tradition or because formal procedure ordains it, and nothing practical ordains it.

  Andy Grove

  Flow, Firsts, Steps

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• In mathematical science, more than in all others, it happens that truths which are at one period the most abstract, and apparently the most remote from all useful application, become in the next age the bases of profound physical inquiries, and in the succeeding one, perhaps, by proper simplification and reduction to tables, furnish their ready and daily aid to the artist and the sailor.

  Charles Babbage

  Artist, Profound, Age

  Charles Babbage, Peter Mark Roget (1989). “Reflections on the decline of science in England and on some of its causes: with a new appendix of correspondence by Charles Babbage & Peter M. Roget from the Philosophical magazine”

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• By sort of combining the research of a lot of smart people, I came up with an equation for dread [dread=uncontrollability+unfamiliarity+imaginability+suffering+scale of destruction+unfairness]. The dread equation is a simplification, but it's a way to explain why we fear something so much when it is so unlikely. Part of it is the lack of control. That's why we're more scared of plane crashes than car crashes even though we know rationally which is more dangerous.

  Amanda Ripley

  Smart, Car, People

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Happiness, the goal to which we all are striving is reached by endeavoring to make the lives of others happy, and if by renouncing the luxuries of life we can lighten the burdens of others.... surely the simplification of our wants is a thing greatly to be desired! And so, if instead of supposing that we must become hermits and dwellers in caves in order to practice simplicity, we set about simplifying our affairs, each according to his own convictions and opportunity, much good will result and the simple life will at once be established.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Happiness, Opportunity, Simple

  Mahatma Gandhi (2012). “The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas”, p.62, Vintage

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• The Declaration of Independence is the all-time masterpiece of ideological simplification. There in a single sentence of self-evident truth, the founding Fathers put into clear, easily understandable focus, the broad basis of man's relationship to God, to government, and to his fellow man.

  Clarence Manion

  Father, Men, Self

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• Government systems suffer from two weaknesses. They are complex. And they are slow. We need to change this. Our systems need to be made sharp, effective, fast and flexible. This requires simplification of processes and having trust in citizens. This needs a Policy Driven State.

  Narendra Modi

  Two, Government, Suffering

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• It's just that the longer I fish, the more I long for simplification and lightness.

  Tom Sutcliffe

  Fishing, Rivers, Lakes

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• Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Simple, Complexity, Sophistication

  "The Age of Uncertainty". Documentary, 1977.

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• People who don’t know how to summarize have no dignity. Neither do people who needlessly drag on their messy lives. They who don’t know the beauty of simplification, of pruning away the unnecessary, die without ever comprehending the true meaning of life.

  Young-Ha Kim

  People, Meaning Of Life, Pruning

  Young-ha Kim (2007). “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Ulysses ... is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.

  E. M. Forster

  Dog, Character, Light

  'Aspects of the Novel' (1927) ch. 6 (on James Joyce's 'Ulysses')

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• The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, "Look at me." Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance.

  Henry James

  Illustration, Media, Mind

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• The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification.

  Susan Sontag

  Jobs, Lying, Voice

  Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.193, Macmillan

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• Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction. The source of Greek and Roman classicism - clarity, order, proportion, balance - is in Egypt.

  Camille Paglia

  Egypt, Order, Greek

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, Vintage

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• He can be regarded as the great master of simplification. The art of resolving the tension at the critical moment and in the most effacious way so as to clarify the position as desired is Capablanca's own.

  Max Euwe

  Art, Critical Moments, Chess

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• 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.

  Aldous Huxley

  Real, Memorable, Omission

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• I like silent pictures and I always have ... I wanted to restore some of this beauty. I thought of it, I remember in this way: one of techniques of modern art is simplification, and that I must therefore simplify this film.

  Akira Kurosawa

  Art, Technique, Way

  Akira Kurosawa, Donald Richie (1987). “Rashomon”, p.18, Rutgers University Press

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• A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.

  A. S. Byatt

  Beautiful, Mirrors, Dolls

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• I had a new idea in my head... this time it's just simply my bedroom, only here colour is to do everything, and, giving by its simplification a grander style to things, is to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, to look at the picture ought to rest the brain or rather the imagination.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Sleep, Ideas, Giving

  Vincent van Gogh, Mark Roskill (1997). “The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh”, p.297, Simon and Schuster

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• If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.

  Alain de Botton

  Art, Imagination, World

  Alain de Botton (2003). “The Art of Travel”, p.13, Penguin UK

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