--- title: "Simplification Quotes | QuotesBy.net" description: "45 quotes about simplification from 42 authors." image: "https://quotesby.net/wp-content/themes/quotesby-editorial/assets/og-default.png" --- ## Short simplification quotes 1. > If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some. [Alan Perlis](https://quotesby.net/Alan-Perlis)[Alan Perlis quote \#11](https://quotesby.net/Alan-Perlis/11/ "Permalink to quote 11") 2. > It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential. [Bruce Lee](https://quotesby.net/Bruce-Lee)[Bruce Lee quote \#113](https://quotesby.net/Bruce-Lee/113/ "Permalink to quote 113") 3. > Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child. [Stanislaw Lem](https://quotesby.net/Stanislaw-Lem)[Stanislaw Lem quote \#14](https://quotesby.net/Stanislaw-Lem/14/ "Permalink to quote 14") 4. > The simplification of anything is always sensational. [Gilbert Keith Chesterton](https://quotesby.net/Gilbert-Keith-Chesterton)[Gilbert Keith Chesterton quote \#6](https://quotesby.net/Gilbert-Keith-Chesterton/6/ "Permalink to quote 6") 5. > Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality... :-) [Larry Wall](https://quotesby.net/Larry-Wall)[Larry Wall quote \#17](https://quotesby.net/Larry-Wall/17/ "Permalink to quote 17") 6. > My theory of hitting was just to watch the ball as it came in and hit it. \[2\] [Tommy Lasorda](https://quotesby.net/Tommy-Lasorda)[Tommy Lasorda quote \#2](https://quotesby.net/Tommy-Lasorda/2/ "Permalink to quote 2") 7. > Universal history is the history of a few metaphors. [Jorge Luis Borges](https://quotesby.net/Jorge-Luis-Borges)[Jorge Luis Borges quote \#95](https://quotesby.net/Jorge-Luis-Borges/95/ "Permalink to quote 95") 8. > Genius is the ability to look at things simply. [E. Lee Spence](https://quotesby.net/E.-Lee-Spence)[E. Lee Spence quote \#1](https://quotesby.net/E.-Lee-Spence/1/ "Permalink to quote 1") ## More simplification quotes 1. > We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract. [Nassim Nicholas Taleb](https://quotesby.net/Nassim-Nicholas-Taleb)[Nassim Nicholas Taleb quote \#12](https://quotesby.net/Nassim-Nicholas-Taleb/12/ "Permalink to quote 12") 2. > Jeet Kune Do, It's just a name, don't fuss over it. There's no such thing as a style if you understand the roots of combat. [Bruce Lee](https://quotesby.net/Bruce-Lee)[Bruce Lee quote \#116](https://quotesby.net/Bruce-Lee/116/ "Permalink to quote 116") 3. > To think out a problem is not unlike drawing a caricature. You have to exaggerate the salient point and leave out that which is not typical. 'To illustrate a principle,' says Bagehot, 'you must exaggerate much and you must omit much.' As to the quantity of absolute truth in a thought: it seems to me the more comprehensive and unobjectionable a thought becomes, the more clumsy and unexciting it gets. I like half-truths of a certain kind - they are interesting and they stimulate. [Eric Hoffer](https://quotesby.net/Eric-Hoffer)[Eric Hoffer quote \#120](https://quotesby.net/Eric-Hoffer/120/ "Permalink to quote 120") 4. > 'Think simple' as my old master used to say. Meaning, reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles. [Frank Lloyd Wright](https://quotesby.net/Frank-Lloyd-Wright)[Frank Lloyd Wright quote \#82](https://quotesby.net/Frank-Lloyd-Wright/82/ "Permalink to quote 82") 5. > The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything. [Gilbert Keith Chesterton](https://quotesby.net/Gilbert-Keith-Chesterton)[Gilbert Keith Chesterton quote \#42](https://quotesby.net/Gilbert-Keith-Chesterton/42/ "Permalink to quote 42") 6. > All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the 'fifties' or 'sixties,' as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix. [Lester Bangs](https://quotesby.net/Lester-Bangs)[Lester Bangs quote \#18](https://quotesby.net/Lester-Bangs/18/ "Permalink to quote 18") 7. > Next comes the realist phase ('After all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top.'). [Terry Pratchett](https://quotesby.net/Terry-Pratchett)[Terry Pratchett quote \#76](https://quotesby.net/Terry-Pratchett/76/ "Permalink to quote 76") 8. > The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticism of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system, which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child ; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them; and for this obvious reason, that nonsense can never be explained. [Thomas Jefferson](https://quotesby.net/Thomas-Jefferson)[Thomas Jefferson quote \#71](https://quotesby.net/Thomas-Jefferson/71/ "Permalink to quote 71") 9. > Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page. [Willa Cather](https://quotesby.net/Willa-Cather)[Willa Cather quote \#80](https://quotesby.net/Willa-Cather/80/ "Permalink to quote 80") 10. > Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification - the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit. [Karl Popper](https://quotesby.net/Karl-Popper)[Karl Popper quote \#8](https://quotesby.net/Karl-Popper/8/ "Permalink to quote 8") 11. > I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done, so now I just have to fill in the rest. [Steven Wright](https://quotesby.net/Steven-Wright)[Steven Wright quote \#107](https://quotesby.net/Steven-Wright/107/ "Permalink to quote 107") 12. > All you have to do is kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will crumble to the ground. [Adolf Hitler](https://quotesby.net/Adolf-Hitler)[Adolf Hitler quote \#155](https://quotesby.net/Adolf-Hitler/155/ "Permalink to quote 155") 13. > Well, the first cause is not...it's lightning striking a mud puddle. See, and this is what the evolutionists say. And by the way, they may be right -- you know, I'm not a scientist, they could be right. [Ben Stein](https://quotesby.net/Ben-Stein)[Ben Stein quote \#17](https://quotesby.net/Ben-Stein/17/ "Permalink to quote 17") 14. > We're sucking the gooey cellulite from modern music. Reductive synthesis. We do it all for you. [Devo](https://quotesby.net/Devo)[Devo quote \#13](https://quotesby.net/Devo/13/ "Permalink to quote 13") 15. > Pour qu'un ensemble de sensations soit devenu un souvenir susceptible d'etre classe dans le temps, il faut qu'il ait cesse d'etre actuel, que nous ayons perdu le sens de son infinie complexite, sans quoi il serait reste actuel. Il faut qu'il ait pour ainsi dire cristallise autour d'un centre d'associations d'idees qui sera comme une sorte d'etiquette. Ce n'est que quand ils auront ainsi perdu toute vie que nous pourrons classer nos souvenirs dans le temps, comme un botaniste range dans son herbier les fleurs dessechees. [Henri Poincare](https://quotesby.net/Henri-Poincare)[Henri Poincare quote \#11](https://quotesby.net/Henri-Poincare/11/ "Permalink to quote 11") 16. > He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand. [Lewis Carroll](https://quotesby.net/Lewis-Carroll)[Lewis Carroll quote \#7](https://quotesby.net/Lewis-Carroll/7/ "Permalink to quote 7") 17. > Jim 'The Waco Kid' (Gene Wilder): 'My name is Jim, most people call me... Jim.' [Mel Brooks](https://quotesby.net/Mel-Brooks)[Mel Brooks quote \#2](https://quotesby.net/Mel-Brooks/2/ "Permalink to quote 2") 18. > The five attitudes are: Upper, Middle, Lower, Right Side, and Left Side. These are the five. Although attitude has these five dimensions, the one purpose of all of them is to cut the enemy. There are none but these five attitudes. Whatever attitude you are in, do not be conscious of making the attitude; think only of cutting. [Miyamoto Musashi](https://quotesby.net/Miyamoto-Musashi)[Miyamoto Musashi quote \#33](https://quotesby.net/Miyamoto-Musashi/33/ "Permalink to quote 33") 19. > \[Noam Chomsky has\] become the guru of the new anti-capitalist and Third World movements. They take his views very uncritically; it's part of the Seattle mood - whatever America does is wrong. He confronts orthodoxy but he's becoming a big simplifier. What he can't see is Third World and other regimes that are oppressive and not controlled by America. --Fred Halliday, January 2001 \[215\] [Noam Chomsky](https://quotesby.net/Noam-Chomsky)[Noam Chomsky quote \#234](https://quotesby.net/Noam-Chomsky/234/ "Permalink to quote 234") 20. > Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life. [Orson Scott Card](https://quotesby.net/Orson-Scott-Card)[Orson Scott Card quote \#213](https://quotesby.net/Orson-Scott-Card/213/ "Permalink to quote 213") 21. > We know more than we need to know. [William Saroyan](https://quotesby.net/William-Saroyan)[William Saroyan quote \#123](https://quotesby.net/William-Saroyan/123/ "Permalink to quote 123") 22. > We'll use a signal I have tried and found far-reaching and easy to yell. Waa-hoo! [Zane Grey](https://quotesby.net/Zane-Grey)[Zane Grey quote \#1](https://quotesby.net/Zane-Grey/1/ "Permalink to quote 1") 23. > When eating an elephant take one at a time. [Creighton Abrams](https://quotesby.net/Creighton-Abrams)[Creighton Abrams quote \#3](https://quotesby.net/Creighton-Abrams/3/ "Permalink to quote 3") 24. > Making technology work simpler, he was at the heart of that from the first days at Apple. Jef Raskin is one of the most important people in personal computers, to this day. ~ Steve Wozniak [Jef Raskin](https://quotesby.net/Jef-Raskin)[Jef Raskin quote \#19](https://quotesby.net/Jef-Raskin/19/ "Permalink to quote 19") 25. > It is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth. [Alexis de Tocqueville](https://quotesby.net/Alexis-de-Tocqueville)[Alexis de Tocqueville quote \#111](https://quotesby.net/Alexis-de-Tocqueville/111/ "Permalink to quote 111") 26. > I should like to take the wind and water and sand as a motif and work with them, but it has to be simplified in most cases to colour and force lines, just as music has done with sound. [Arthur Dove](https://quotesby.net/Arthur-Dove)[Arthur Dove quote \#1](https://quotesby.net/Arthur-Dove/1/ "Permalink to quote 1") 27. > Physics has in the main contented itself with studying the abridged edition of the book of nature. [Arthur Stanley Eddington](https://quotesby.net/Arthur-Stanley-Eddington)[Arthur Stanley Eddington quote \#2](https://quotesby.net/Arthur-Stanley-Eddington/2/ "Permalink to quote 2") 28. > Never mind what two tons refers to. What is it? How has it entered in so definite a way into our exprerience? Two tons is the reading of the pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing machine. Let us pass on. ... And so we see that the poetry fades out of the problem, and by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left only with pointer readings. [Arthur Stanley Eddington](https://quotesby.net/Arthur-Stanley-Eddington)[Arthur Stanley Eddington quote \#17](https://quotesby.net/Arthur-Stanley-Eddington/17/ "Permalink to quote 17") 29. > You know what causes sexual thoughts? I'm gonna clear the air for you tonight. I'm gonna end this debate, hopefully once and for all while on this planet, 'cause outer space awaits our presence, we are better and more unique creatures than this and all eternity is our playground, so let me go ahead and clear this one issue up once and for all and let's move on to real issues. Here's what causes sexual thoughts: having a dick. [Bill Hicks](https://quotesby.net/Bill-Hicks)[Bill Hicks quote \#43](https://quotesby.net/Bill-Hicks/43/ "Permalink to quote 43") 30. > Then they'd beam down to an oval of gravel with 6 big rocks in the back : every week. 'Oh Captain, strong deja-vu here.' And they'd get out these machines: Widly-we widly-we widly-we widly-we widly-we 'Captain, this entire planet is made of widly-we. And so are you Captain, and Chekov, and Sulu, and Uhura, and everything we've ever thought of is widly-we. I think this might just be a box with widly-we written on it.'' [Eddie Izzard](https://quotesby.net/Eddie-Izzard)[Eddie Izzard quote \#78](https://quotesby.net/Eddie-Izzard/78/ "Permalink to quote 78") 31. > Children and fools want everything, because they want wit to distinguish; there is no stronger evidence of a crazy understanding than the making too large a catalogue of things unneccesary. [George Savile](https://quotesby.net/George-Savile)[George Savile quote \#1](https://quotesby.net/George-Savile/1/ "Permalink to quote 1") 32. > You gotta boil it down to the essentials. It's like Cube says, 'Life ain't nothing but bitches and money.' [Kevin Smith](https://quotesby.net/Kevin-Smith)[Kevin Smith quote \#20](https://quotesby.net/Kevin-Smith/20/ "Permalink to quote 20") 33. > Art is the elimination of the unnecessary. [Pablo Picasso](https://quotesby.net/Pablo-Picasso)[Pablo Picasso quote \#51](https://quotesby.net/Pablo-Picasso/51/ "Permalink to quote 51") 34. > 'Mountains, Bruce, mountains,' the manager said. 'Mountains, Bruce, mountains,' Bruce said and gazed. 'Echolalia, Bruce, echolalia,' the manager said. 'Echolalia, Bruce-' 'Okay, Bruce,' the manager said, and shut the cabin door behind him, thinking, I believe I'll put him among the carrots. Or beets. Something simple. Something that won't puzzle him. [Philip Kindred Dick](https://quotesby.net/Philip-Kindred-Dick)[Philip Kindred Dick quote \#49](https://quotesby.net/Philip-Kindred-Dick/49/ "Permalink to quote 49") 35. > And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke. [Rudyard Kipling](https://quotesby.net/Rudyard-Kipling)[Rudyard Kipling quote \#10](https://quotesby.net/Rudyard-Kipling/10/ "Permalink to quote 10") 36. > All you need is love. [John Lennon](https://quotesby.net/John-Lennon)[John Lennon quote \#37](https://quotesby.net/John-Lennon/37/ "Permalink to quote 37") 37. > J. C. Watts is the only black member of the Republican Party in leadership. He's going to resign from Congress. He's been there seven and a half years. He's had enough. Nobody can believe it. Nobody in Washington can believe it... In an interview two days ago, Watts said, Here's the problem with Washington: 'If you are explaining, you are losing.' If you are explaining, you're losing. It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem. Six years after this battle began, we're still explaining. We're still explaining and we are losing. They frame this as a massive battle to stop theft, to protect property... They extend copyrights perpetually. They don't get how that in itself is a form of theft. A theft of our common culture. We have failed in getting them to see what the issues here are and that's why we live in this place where a tradition speaks of freedom and their controls take it away. [Lawrence Lessig](https://quotesby.net/Lawrence-Lessig)[Lawrence Lessig quote \#28](https://quotesby.net/Lawrence-Lessig/28/ "Permalink to quote 28") ```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://quotesby.net/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Topics", "item": "https://quotesby.net/topics/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Simplification", "item": "https://quotesby.net/topics/simplification/" } ] } { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "CollectionPage", "name": "Simplification Quotes", "url": "https://quotesby.net/topics/simplification/", "about": { "@type": "Thing", "name": "Simplification" }, "hasPart": [ { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Alan-Perlis/11/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Alan Perlis" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Bruce-Lee/113/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Bruce Lee" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Nassim-Nicholas-Taleb/12/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Nassim Nicholas Taleb" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Stanislaw-Lem/14/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Stanislaw Lem" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Jeet Kune Do, It's just a name, don't fuss over it. There's no such thing as a style if you understand the roots of combat.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Bruce-Lee/116/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Bruce Lee" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "To think out a problem is not unlike drawing a caricature. You have to exaggerate the salient point and leave out that which is not typical. 'To illustrate a principle,' says Bagehot, 'you must exaggerate much and you must omit much.' As to the quantity of absolute truth in a thought: it seems to me the more comprehensive and unobjectionable a thought becomes, the more clumsy and unexciting it gets. I like half-truths of a certain kind - they are interesting and they stimulate.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Eric-Hoffer/120/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Eric Hoffer" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "'Think simple' as my old master used to say. Meaning, reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Frank-Lloyd-Wright/82/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Frank Lloyd Wright" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "The simplification of anything is always sensational.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Gilbert-Keith-Chesterton/6/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Gilbert Keith Chesterton" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Gilbert-Keith-Chesterton/42/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Gilbert Keith Chesterton" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality... :-)", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Larry-Wall/17/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Larry Wall" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the 'fifties' or 'sixties,' as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Lester-Bangs/18/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Lester Bangs" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Next comes the realist phase ('After all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top.').", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Terry-Pratchett/76/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Terry Pratchett" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticism of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system, which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child ; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them; and for this obvious reason, that nonsense can never be explained.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Thomas-Jefferson/71/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Thomas Jefferson" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "My theory of hitting was just to watch the ball as it came in and hit it. [2]", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Tommy-Lasorda/2/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Tommy Lasorda" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Willa-Cather/80/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Willa Cather" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification - the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Karl-Popper/8/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Karl Popper" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done, so now I just have to fill in the rest.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Steven-Wright/107/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Steven Wright" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Jorge-Luis-Borges/95/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Jorge Luis Borges" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "All you have to do is kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will crumble to the ground.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Adolf-Hitler/155/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Adolf Hitler" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Well, the first cause is not...it's lightning striking a mud puddle. See, and this is what the evolutionists say. And by the way, they may be right -- you know, I'm not a scientist, they could be right.", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Ben-Stein/17/", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Ben Stein" } } ] } ```