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Simplicity Quotes

Albert Einstein heads a small list, followed by Steve Maraboli, François Fénelon and others with two entries each. The sourced lines include Edsger Dijkstra’s from 1975, that simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability, and Goldsmith’s from The Deserted Village (1770), about one native charm being dearer than all the gloss of art.

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time” is credited to Mark Twain and marked misattributed. The notes give the French original, “Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte,” which is Pascal’s, from the Provincial Letters. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” is credited to Leonardo da Vinci and disputed.

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Most quoted on simplicity:

He had a quiet way with the girls, and with the men a way of solemn, blinking simplicity which caused the more hasty in judgment to consider him a fool.

James Branch Cabell Figures of Earth (1921)

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.

Edsger W. Dijkstra Dijkstra (1984)

There's an applied style of being minimal and simple, and then there's real simplicity. This looks simple, because it really is.

Jonathan Ive

Between Margaret's fine-edged art and Gladys's rough simplicity, where did the greater feminine solace lie? True art, after all, is simple.

Angus Wilson No Laughing Matter (1967)

It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences.

Aristotle

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Aphorisms (1765)

I feel a burning desire to become grand in simplicity.

Paula Modersohn-Becker

One of the principal objects of theoretical research is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in the greatest simplicity.

Josiah Willard Gibbs

The probability may now be assumed that the human race sprung from one stock which was at first in a state of simplicity if not barbarism.

Robert Chambers Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844)

A theory is the more impressive, the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more diverse things it connects, and the wider its scope

Albert Einstein Autobiographical Notes (1949)

Rich in saving common-sense,
And, as the greatest only are,
In his simplicity sublime.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852)

What is simplicity? Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution.

Ward Cunningham A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

Anyone can build complicated. Our actions are determined by simplicity.

Sergei Korolev

I sang with the simplicity of a sixteen-year-old girl whose mind is uncluttered by prejudices. I never had any, I'm not a conformist.

Gigliola Cinquetti

Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws.

Wolfgang Pauli

The simplicity of Bell's proof opens it to everyone, not just physicists and mathematicians.

Nick Herbert

An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity.

Terry A. Davis

No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.

William Kingdon Clifford The Ethics of Belief (1877)

One of the principal objects of research in my department of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in the greatest simplicity.

Josiah Willard Gibbs

Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.

Eric Temple Bell Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science (1938)

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