Simplification Quotes - Page 3

• Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Running, Reality, Perspective

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• One charming characteristic of many flank attacks I could mention is that they do not very often lead to simplification: if the attack is parried, there usually are still opportunities left for initiating action in another sector.

  Bent Larsen

  Opportunity, Chess, Action

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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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• 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.

  Ryszard Kapuscinski

  Ocean, Reality, Doe

  Ryszard Kapuscinski (2001). “The Shadow of the Sun”, p.6, Vintage

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• 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.

  Barack Obama

  Struggle, Diversity, Together

  Barack Obama (2007). “Dreams From My Father”, p.10, Canongate Books

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• Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.

  Eric Hoffer

  Type, Reduction, Categories

  Eric Hoffer (1963). “The Ordeal of Change”

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• There are elements of intrinsic beauty in the simplification of a house built on the log cabin idea. First, there is the bare beauty of the logs themselves with their long lines and firm curves. Then there is the open charm felt of the structural features which are not hidden under plaster and ornament, but are clearly revealed, a charm felt in Japanese architecture....The quiet rhythmic monotone of the wall of logs fills one with the rustic peace of a secluded nook in the woods.

  Gustav Stickley

  Wall, Curves, Ideas

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• O sancta simplicitas! What strange simplification and falsification mankind lives on! One can never cease to marvel once one has acquired eyes for this marvel! How we have made everything around us bright and free and easy and simple! How we have known how to bestow on our senses a passport to everything superficial, on our thoughts a divine desire for wanton gambling and false conclusions! - how we have from the very beginning understood how to retain our ignorance so as to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, frivolity, impetuosity, bravery, cheerfulness of life, so as to enjoy life!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Eye, Ignorance, Simple

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• It would seem that more than function itself, simplicity is the deciding factor in the aesthetic equation. One might call the process beauty through function and simplification.

  Raymond Loewy

  Science, Simplicity, Might

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• Twitter is the ultimate service for the mobile age. Its simplification and constraint of the publishing medium to 140 characters is perfectly complementary to a mobile experience. People still need longer stuff, but they see the headline on Twitter or Facebook.

  Matt Mullenweg

  Character, Phones, People

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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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• 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.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Fashion, Lying, Angel

  Stanislaw Lem (1984). “His Master's Voice”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• One of the most important skills of the economist, therefore, is that of simplification of the model. Two important methods of simplification have been developed by economists. One is the method of partial equilibrium analysis (or microeconomics), generally associated with the name of Alfred Marshall and the other is the method of aggregation (or macro-economics), associated with the name of John Maynard Keynes.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Skills, Names, Two

  "The Skills of the Economist". Book by Kenneth Ewart Boulding, p. 19, 1958.

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• There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Simplicity, Trying, Razors

  Charles Sanders Peirce, Patricia Ann Turrisi (1997). “Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism”, p.162, SUNY Press

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• With Complicated Grief I can say that there was a certain simplification in the process. Getting older means less wasted effort, things are clearer earlier. Being young meant flailing around a lot, especially as I was trying to invent new shapes without a ton of models.

  Laura Mullen

  Grief, Mean, Effort

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think part of the bad thing is that skill is emphasized so much that a lot of people, by the time they get to Juilliard, well I think they kind of forget why they got into music in the first place and if they're performers - this is a simplification, but a lot of them are trying to win a competition and play more accurately, or better, or more beautifully, whatever can be measured, than somebody else.

  Tod Machover

  Thinking, Winning, Play

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I do feel that, generally, people will see me and go, "He knows where the good food is," which is an awesome correlative. It's an awesome simplification.

  Adam Richman

  People, Good Food, Feels

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Culture is a simplification and a lie. It's the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it.

  Terence McKenna

  Lying, Smart, People

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• We should always bear in mind that numbers represent a simplification of reality.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Reality, Numbers, Mind

  Kenneth E. Boulding (1990). “Three Faces of Power”, p.96, SAGE

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• Simplification seems to be the removal of objects for the goal of making a graphic as clean and uncluttered as possible. Whereas, with optimization, it feels like there's more intelligence in that. It maintains the usability, but tries to distill something down to its essence. But with some data-sets you have to be careful because, as with linear, print journalism, it's easy to shave off facts that don't quite fit the flow.

  David Mccandless

  Goal, Trying, Journalism

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• Like medieval theologians we had a philosophy that explained everything to us in advance, and everything that did not fit could be readily identified as a fraud or a lie or an illusion... The perniciousness of the anti-Communist ideology of the Truman Doctrine arises not from any patent falsehood but from its distortion and simplification of reality, from its universalization and its elevation to the status of a revealed truth.

  J. William Fulbright

  Lying, Philosophy, Reality

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• Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simplification. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of culture.

  Frantz Fanon

  Essence, Culture, Deterioration

  Frantz Fanon (1965). “Damnés de la terre”, Grove Pr

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