“Nature always uses the simplest means to accomplish its effects.”

— Pierre Louis Maupertuis

Formulation of the principle of least action, as stated in Mémoires de l'académie royale des sciences (Accord between different laws of Nature that seemed incompatible), 1748, 417-426 (15 April 1744).

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Pierre Louis Maupertuis 24

French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters 1698–1759

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“The refraction of light agrees with the grand principle that Nature always uses the simplest means to accomplish its effects. From this principle, can be derived whenever light passes from one medium to another, the ratio of the sine of the angle of refraction to the sine of the angle of refraction equals the inverse ratio of the speeds at which light moves in each medium.
But this "budget", this expense of action that Nature minimizes in the refraction of light, is it also minimized in the direct propagation and reflection of light? Yes, it always has the smallest possible value.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Accord de différentes loix de la nature qui avoient jusqu’ici paru incompatibles (1744)

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“There is nothing that God has judged good for us that He has not given us the means to accomplish, both in the natural and the moral world.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

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“Our experience hitherto justifies us in trusting that nature is the realization of the simplest that is mathematically conceivable.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

from On the Method of Theoretical Physics, p. 183. The Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford (10 June 1933). Quoted in Einstein's Philosophy of Science http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/
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Context: Our experience hitherto justifies us in trusting that nature is the realization of the simplest that is mathematically conceivable. I am convinced that purely mathematical construction enables us to find those concepts and those lawlike connections between them that provide the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Useful mathematical concepts may well be suggested by experience, but in no way can they be derived from it. Experience naturally remains the sole criterion of the usefulness of a mathematical construction for physics. But the actual creative principle lies in mathematics. Thus, in a certain sense, I take it to be true that pure thought can grasp the real, as the ancients had dreamed.

“That was the nature of chaos; its effects spanned time in ways that were not always immediately discernible, not even by beings outside of time.”

Karen Lord (1968) Barbadian novelist and sociologist of religion

Source: Redemption in Indigo (2010), Chapter 9 “A Stranger is Coming to Makendha” (p. 69)

“Classification in its simplest terms, means putting together things or ideas that are alike, and keeping separate those that are different.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 1; Partly cited in Jens-Erik Mai (2010) Classiﬁcation in a social world: bias and trust http://jenserikmai.info/Papers/2010_Classificationinasocialworld.pdf Journal of Documentation Vol. 66 No. 5, 2010. p. 640; Also cited in ( Bawden, 1991 http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~dbawden/reactionspaper.pdf).

“The first obligation of Simplicity is that of using the simplest means to secure the fullest effect. But although the mind instinctlvely rejects all needless complexity, we shall greatly err if we fail to recognise the fact, that what the mind recoils from is not the complexity, but the needlessness.”

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The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)

“I don't know what it means to accomplish things in normalcy, it's not in my DNA. Whatever I accomplish, I always exaggerate.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Non so cosa significhi realizzare cose nella normalità, non è nel mio DNA. Qualunque cosa io realizzi, esagero sempre.
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“The abstract human mind will have to receive the intended impression by its own means. I always confine myself to expressing the universal, that is, the eternal (closest to the spirit) and I do so in the simplest of external forms, in order to be able to express the inner meaning as lightly veiled as possible.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote of Mondrian in his letter to Theo van Doesburg, 1915; as cited in the 'Stijl' catalogue, 1951, p. 71; quoted in De Stijl 1917-1931 - The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art, by H.L.C. Jaffé http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/jaff001stij01_01/jaff001stij01_01.pdf; J.M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1956, p. 6
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“Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature's means.”

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Source: 1870s - 1880s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 39: 'Huysmans and Redon', (written in 1889, published 1953)

“Nature always uses the simplest means to accomplish its effects.”

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Pierre Louis Maupertuis 24

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