Richard Matheson Quotes

Facts are often complicated.

It is not at all simple to understand the simple.

Answers are a perilous grip on the universe. They can appear sensible yet explain nothing.

Nothing is true, but that which is simple.

Truth is simple, requiring neither study nor art.

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

Any effort... to make the obscure obvious is likely to be unappealing, for the penalty of failure is confusion while the reward of success is banality.

Do not think too deeply about these things - gradually they will become clearer to you

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated.

The more I see, the less I know.

I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered that I didn't need to. If the thing is true, why there it is.

If something can't be explained on the back of an envelope, it's rubbish.

To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well.

Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.

If your work is so smart that only smart people get it, it's not that smart.

An expert is someone who takes something you already know and makes it sound confusing.

Too much nicety of detail disgusts the greatest part of readers, and to throw a multitude of particulars under general heads, and lay down rules of extensive comprehension, is to common understandings of little use.

We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.

I suppose if you simplify things, it's going to make it easier to understand.

Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.

An old French mathematician said: "A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street." This clearness and ease of comprehension, here insisted on for a mathematical theory, I should still more demand for a mathematical problem if it is to be perfect; for what is clear and easily comprehended attracts, the complicated repels us.

I've spent my life trying to make things simpler. Because I find ultimately that complicated doesn't reach the heart.

Find the heart of it. Make the complex simple, and you can achieve mastery.

In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.

Truth resists simplicity.