Quotes & Sayings About Not Making Things Complicated

What I learned from my work as a physician is that even with the most complicated patients, the most complicated problems, you've got to look hard to find every piece of data and evidence that you can to improve your decision-making. Medicine has taught me to be very much evidence-based and data-driven in making decisions. — Jim Yong Kim

Personally I think there is only one thing to do: find the task we have been placed on this earth to do, and accomplish it as best we can, with all our strength, without making things complicated or thinking there's anything divine about our animal nature. This is the only way we will ever feel that we have been doing something constructive when death comes to get us. — Muriel Barbery

Squinting in the darkness Anya could just make out a strange curving symbol scratched into the bark. Baba Zosia scored a line through it, disfiguring the symbol. Anya felt something in the air change and give, like the forest had let out a breath it had been holding around them. Something like static pricked the back of her neck as Baba Zosia cut her finger and smeared blood on the tree. The strange symbol melted into the bark, healing the tree to appear like nothing had been carved on it to begin with. Lifting her hands towards the campsite Baba Zosia started to chant softly in the complicated language of the tribe. Magic thrummed through the air, making Anya's own flare and itch under her skin. She rubbed her arms to stop it. Around her a breeze picked up and the campground, with its tracks in the mud and stains from the fires all melted away until there was nothing but autumn leaf litter and debris in its place. It looked like it hadn't been disturbed for years. — Amy Kuivalainen

But at last I came to understand that I was making it too complicated. For you, this is no mingling at all; for you the Book of Revelation, the ramblings of Hermes Trismegistus, and Principia Mathematica are all signatures torn from the same immense Book. — Neal Stephenson

As for documentary, it was a natural progression from my earlier career in journalism. The two media are connected, but of course making films is much more complicated, because you have image, sound and music to work with, not simply words. — Nancy Kates

The process of tracing regularity in any complicated, and at first sight confused, set of appearances, is necessarily tentative; we begin by making any supposition, even a false one, to see what consequences will follow from it ; and by observing how these differ from the real phenomena, we learn what corrections to make in our assumption. — John Stuart Mill

Comfort, simplicity, practicality - these are all American words. It is simplicity in fabric and way of cut. You cannot produce complicated clothes or spend ten days making a dress. Mine is all done by scaling measurements. I use the body as the land, as when building a house. — Zoran

He had been to see Mrs. Erlich just before starting home for the holidays, and found her making German Christmas cakes. She took him into the kitchen and explained the almost holy traditions that governed this complicated cookery. Her excitement and seriousness as she beat and stirred were very pretty, Claude thought. She told off on her fingers the many ingredients, but he believed there were things she did not name: the fragrance of old friendships, the glow of early memories, belief in wonder-working rhymes and songs. — Willa Cather

For the problem of decision-making in our complicated world is not how to get the problem simple enough so that we can all understand it; the problem is how to get our thinking about the problem as complex as humanly possible
and thus approach (we can never match) the complexity of the real world around us. — Harlan Cleveland

They make laws that no one wants, then make money disagreeing with each other what the damned law means, and the more they disagree the more money they make, but still they go on making laws, and they make them ever more complicated so that they can get paid for arguing ever more intricately with one another! I grant you they're clever buggers, but God, how I hate lawyers. — Bernard Cornwell

Language is a very complicated thing, and that's one of the reasons why I like making photographs. — Catherine Opie

Utopias bore me. I'm interested in constructing messy, complicated societies that are full of flaws and then saying, ooh, this is interesting, let's see what happens if I poke it here. And concurrently with this and the previous point, I'm interested in making up cultures that are different — Marie Brennan

What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem and enumerated all of the dissastisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own. — Neal Stephenson

Making a film is like putting out a fire with sieve. There are so many elements, and it gets so complicated. — George Lucas

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. — Confucius

Sometimes it's harder than you think. There's always this fear that even though I may know what I want, I may never actually make it a reality. Sometimes it's more complicated than just wanting something and making it happen. — Kandi Steiner

I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it. — John Irving

The only way that you can keep moving forward, finding other ways of expressing things about this increasingly complicated world that we live in, is by listening and observing not only to life around you but to the other people who are in the room. It's not about a sort of, you know, a sense that you have to be democratic about these things, it's a question of creativity that the process of making theatre is a collaborative process, and it is not in, it is not a question of, you know, I have no interest in paying lip service to it, for me it's absolutely fundamental. — Simon McBurney

I don't deny that impulse drew us together, but while physical gratification began and ended it for you, in making love, dumbo here - - ' she jerked a thumb at her chest ' - was also demonstrating that she cared.'
His tongue moistened his lips. 'You're very up-front, aren't you?'
'You mean none of your other rejects have ever looked you in the eye and complained?' Sian queried. She might have made things easy last night, but she refused to make anything easy for him now. 'I suppose you'd prefer it if I shrugged my shoulders, muttered something about it being nice while it lasted, and filed the experience away under lessons learned? Well, sorry, but for me, and for most women if they're honest, going to bed with someone is a darn sight more complicated than that! — Elizabeth Oldfield

His woolly grey hair, short thick body, air of perpetual busyness, suggested an industrious gnome conscripted into the service of the army; a gnome who also liked to practise considerable malice against the race of men with whom he mingled, by making as complicated as possible every transaction they had to execute through himself. — Anthony Powell

Being a mother is complicated because it's not just a paternal culture making demands on you; it's those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated. — Siri Hustvedt

The shareholders who financed the risk taking had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing, and, as the risk taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished. All that was clear was that the profits to be had from smart people making complicated bets overwhelmed anything that could be had from servicing customers, or allocating capital to productive enterprise. — Michael Lewis

Comedy, not screaming at someone, can make someone lift their legs higher. There is a way to do a push-up and a sit-up, and it doesn't have to be so complicated. Everyone is putting a difficult twist to it and making you do way too much. — Richard Simmons

All you have to do is try, with meaningful words, properly and effectively arranged, to honestly unroll your sentences and paragraphs, clearly, sensibly, just explaining what you're up to as well and as powerfully as you can. Let your ideas be understood without making them complicated or obscure. And see, too, if your pages can make sad men laugh as they read, and make smiling men even happier; try to keep simple men untroubled, and wise men impressed by your imagination, and sober men not contemptuous, nor careful men reluctant, to praise it. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

A big complicated mess is easy. Making something simple and clear is hard. — D.F. Lamont

Wake up to the real world. Look at what's happening in the region. Look at where people are going, how people react to humiliation and marginalization. I do not think a few more votes is worth making this menace - that we all face - far more complicated. People have to wake up to that and respond to that, not politicize it. — Mohammad Javad Zarif

I dug my hand into the small spot and pulled out a key attached to a big black key chain with buttons for locking and unlocking doors. My head jerked up to see his serious expression. Patti covered her mouth, saying nothing.
"No more boys taking you on trips, you hear?" His voice was gravelly. "You can take your own self from now on. Last thing you need is some boy distracting you and making this whole situation even more complicated. Promise me you'll stay away from that son of Pharzuph."
[ ... ]
"I tried that once, John," Patti warned him. "It didn't work out so well for me. — Wendy Higgins

So why the stress?" said Gene. "You have had sex before?"
"Of course," I said. "My doctor is strongly in favor."
"Frontiers of medical science," said Gene.
He was probably making a joke. I think the value of regular sex has been known for some time. I explained further. "It's just adding a second person makes it complicated. — Graeme Simsion

The New START accord cuts the strategic nuclear arsenals on each side to 1,550 warheads. Can any of its critics make a case that our security would be imperiled if, the very next day, Obama and Medvedev made moves to take the levels down to 1,000 - then to 500?
If so, come show us the math. If not, it may be time to stop making arms control so politically complicated - time to stop letting arms control get in the way of disarmament. — Fred Kaplan

Marriage is not just about love and living together. It's much more complicated, especially when you are going to be making a family. — Laura Schlessinger

I'm into using acrylic, in a complicated kind of way: Making it just as good as oil paint - better, maybe. It's odd - when I started out, acrylic was for children, pretty much. It was a cheaper paint. It wasn't supposed to look very good or last very long. — Peter Saul

If a handful of people look at the making of the film and realize, "Oh, my god!" It was so complicated. It was like doing quantum physics calculations every day while you're telling a joke. It was so insane! So, they can feel my pain. — Rob Letterman

In every society information is a means of making a living or wielding power, but Arabs husband information and hold it especially tightly. U.S. trainers have often been surprised over the years by the fact that information provided to key personnel does not get much further than them. Having learned to perform some complicated procedure, an Arab technician knows that he is invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge; once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and his power dissipates. — Norvell B. De Atkine

Making a lie complicated... doesn't sound true.

(BackStrom Season 1 episode 7) — Deyth Banger