Edward Tufte Quotes

There are no more simple images... The world is too much for an image. You need several of them, a chain of images.

We're quite into graphics that are simultaneously two- and three-dimensional. But I can't really elaborate any further because it's not something - we haven't really perfected it.

Things danced on the screen do not look the way they do on the stage. On the stage, dancing is three-dimensional, but a motion picture is two-dimensional.

Everything seems really simple on paper until you take a camera out of the box.

I try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty.

I'm very interested in how we read things, especially the link between seeing two-dimensional and three-dimensional images, because of how I read.

The first effect of looking at a good photograph through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting ever produced. The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out

Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory - the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have out paper allegories but ill comprehended.

We're part of the unfolding world, surfing the chaotic waves

Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.

The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.

A character is 2D, and then after I come in it becomes a 3D; it becomes alive.

My pictures are complex and so am I. When I am almost symbolistic in writing, there is a more limiting difference’s of accepting, while I can be even more complex in the photographs and people can usually accept them within the framework of their own limitations or lack of limitations – there is no dictionary meaning… they can look up for the photographic image and allow it to confuse them.

Perspective is nothing more than a rational demonstration applied to the consideration of how objects in front of the eye transmit their image to it, by means of a pyramid of lines. The Pyramid is the name I apply to the lines which, starting from the surface and edges of each object, converge from a distance and meet in a single point.

The very best [infographics] engender and facilitate an insight by visual means - allow us to grasp some relationship quickly and easily that otherwise would take many pages and illustrations and tables to convey. Insight seems to happen most often when data sets are crossed in the design of the piece - when we can quickly see the effects on something over time, for example, or view how factors like income, race, geography, or diet might affect other data. When that happens, there's an instant "Aha!".

We're extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.

There's nothing shameful in acknowledging that you don't have the answers to every question about life. Just accept the fact that you know only a fraction of what's going on in the world. You don't have to attach explanations in terms of a special revelation of God's will, a glimpse at the supernatural, evidence of a conspiracy, or anything else.

There is nothing more common than critics of journalists accusing them of practicing journalism. It is our function in the world to take things that are complicated and render them in a form that non-experts can follow and make sense of.

My reaction to 3D is subtly. Things don't come out at you, but rather you - The audience come into the film.

The World requires at least ten years to understand a new idea, however important or simple it may be.

The world is like that -- incomprehensible and full of surprises .

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable.

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

Friction is the only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper.

What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.