Beauty and simplicity...

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Here's a beautiful quote from the article "Taste for Makers" (by Paul Graham):

When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem.
When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.

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To have a sense of humor is to be strong: to keep one's sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one's sense of humor is to be wounded by them.

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Here's a nice one, which reminds me of the dilemma of broadcasters having too much money:

When you have to climb a mountain you toss everything unnecessary out of your pack. And so an architect who has to build on a difficult site, or a small budget, will find that he is forced to produce an elegant design. Fashions and flourishes get knocked aside by the difficult business of solving the problem at all.

Smaller archives are forced to use elegant designs that actually solve the problem, whereas broadcasters just throw enough money at it, until it somehow works. For a very limited time, scope and institutions.

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If you draw a tree and you change the angle of a branch five degrees, no one will know. When you change the angle of someone's eye five degrees, people notice.

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Einstein didn't try to make relativity strange.
He tried to make it true, and the truth turned out to be strange.

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"But if you just try to make good things, you'll inevitably do it in a distinctive way, just as each person walks in a distinctive way.

Michelangelo was not trying to paint like Michelangelo.
He was just trying to paint well; he couldn't help painting like Michelangelo."

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"Good design is often daring.
At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise."

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"Today's experimental error is tomorrow's new theory. If you want to discover great new things, then instead of turning a blind eye to the places where conventional wisdom and truth don't quite meet, you should pay particular attention to them."

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"Intolerance for ugliness is not in itself enough. You have to understand a field well before you develop a good nose for what needs fixing."