“People are too complicated to have simple labels.”

Source: The Amber Spyglass

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Philip Pullman 161
English author 1946

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“I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that's an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.”

Will and Mary in Ch. 33 : Marzipan
His Dark Materials, The Amber Spyglass (2000)
Context: "When you stopped believing in God, did you stop believing in good and evil?"
"No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that's an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels."

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“The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route.”

George Sand (1804–1876) French novelist and memoirist; pseudonym of Lucile Aurore Dupin

Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué.
Letter to Armand Barbès, (12 May 1867), published in Georges Lubin (ed.) Correspondance (Paris: Garnier Freres, 1964-95) vol. 20, p. 412; Bruce Kajewski Traveling with Hermes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992) p. 32

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“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.”

Charles Mingus (1922–1979) American jazz double bassist, composer and bandleader

Statement in Mainliner (July 1977), as quoted in Creativity and the writing process (1982) by Olivia Bertagnolli, p. 182; also partly quoted in Survival Skills for Managers (1981) by Marlene Wilson, p. 19
Variant: Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.
As quoted in The Evaluation and Treatment of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (1999) by Nils R. Varney and Richard J. Roberts, p. 303
Context: My son's a painter. All through school his teachers tell him he's a genius. I tell him to paint me an apple that looks like and apple before he paints me one that doesn't. Go where you can go, but start from someplace recognizable. Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

“Sometimes a simple question could have a complicated answer.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Blue-Eyed Devil

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“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”

John Von Neumann (1903–1957) Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath

Remark made by von Neumann as keynote speaker at the first national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1947, as mentioned by Franz L. Alt at the end of "Archaeology of computers: Reminiscences, 1945--1947", Communications of the ACM, volume 15, issue 7, July 1972, special issue: Twenty-fifth anniversary of the Association for Computing Machinery, p. 694.

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“The most complicated skill is to be simple.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Simplicity http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21390/Simplicity
From the poems written in English

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“Simple and complicated, as most true things are.”

Variant: It’s as simple as that. Simple and complicated, as most true things are.
Source: Every Day

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