Simple Complexity Quotes

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

Basic Economics 101. It's the most complicated simple subject there is.

The saxophone is actually a translation of the human voice, in my conception. All you can do is play melody. No matter how complicated it gets, it's still a melody.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

When some people look at a shrimp they think, "Hmm. Delicious." When I look at a shrimp I think, "You're a miracle, absolutely incredible. Your ancestors have gone back hundreds of millions of years." And to develop a thing as simple as a shrimp cocktail, you have to calculate the hundreds of millions of years that have preceded that moment where you're sitting there with your sauce and fork poised.

All great expression, which on a superficial survey seems so easy as well as so simple, furnishes after a while, to the faithful observer, its own standard by which to appreciate it.

The first time I saw 'Sunset Boulevard' I was probably eight or nine years old, and it really struck me how it's so simply put and elegant, yet there's so much going on.

The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.

The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad!

As soon as man seeks to penetrate the secrets of Nature--in which nothing is secret and it is but a question of seeing--he realizes that the simple produces the supernatural.

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.

Lying under an acacia tree with the sound of the dawn around me, I realized more clearly the facts that man should never overlook: that the construction of an airplane, for instance, is simple when compared [with] a bird; that airplanes depend on an advanced civilization, and that were civilization is most advanced, few birds exist. I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.

If you go back and look, a completely underrated film is 'Quest for Fire.' That was one of the most genius, simplistic but incredibly sophisticated notion of what it was. The evolution of that was just fantastic.

I love films that are many things at the same time while being simple.

I'm happy to provide that service. But that's the power of it. A good infographic that's been really worked on looks simple and easy, but it actually required a lot of processing.

Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated.

In a way, painting is like wine: it is as old, as simple, as primitive and as varied. Like wine, it is a very specific means of expression, with a limited vocabulary, but vast in its expressive potential.

I'd rather hold one note for an hour and modulate it so that it means something than play 3,000 notes in 15 seconds.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.

With guitar riffs, we always look for something that 's a little bit special. We've always found that it is harder to come up with something that's nice and simple without getting something that's hard but easy.

If all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible?

... Philosophy proper is a subject, on the one hand so hopelessly obscure, on the other so astonishingly elementary, that there knowledge hardly counts.

The simplest things in music are the ones that count. The simplest thing are, of course, also the most difficult to achieve and take years of work.

I enjoy the beauty of the bubble, they're fluid and yet they have these geometric shapes so they do surprising things - two spheres become a single sphere - it's what bubbles do.

Even one word, or certainly one sentence, should be able to describe the basic characteristic that the scene has, or the character has, or the story has. And then you begin to detail that one spine, and you have offshoots from that spine, and it becomes more and more complex, but all of it stems from that one-word, one-line theme, which can give the character, the scene, or the play its uniqueness.