Edward T. Hall Quotes

I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

I have no sense of direction at all. Thank the Lord for my TomTom, otherwise I'd spend my whole life lost.

You don't have to know how to build an automobile or a television set or a laptop to know how to use it.

I have an incredible sense of direction, but London is confusing. It's a circle, but then it stops being a circle.

Modern life is confusing no "Ms take" about it.

In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

You need an infinite stretch of time ahead of you to start to think, infinite energy to make the smallest decision. The world is getting denser. The immense number of useless projects is bewildering. Too many things have to be put in to balance up an uncertain scale. You can't disappear anymore. You die in a state of total indecision.

Amidst the soft variety I'm lost.

It was like looking at a knot, knowing it was a knot, but not knowing how to untie it. I had no map for this life.

Who needs bread crumbs," Dan replied, "when you have GPS?

...everything looks worse in black and white.

I'm a low-tech man in a high-tech world.

I never feel the need to go out and make some grand statement that I'm dark and twisty and complicated, because I'm not that either. It's just not as simple as ponies and rainbows, though I do love ponies and rainbows.

I do not live happily or comfortably With the cleverness of our times. The talk is all about computers, The news is all about bombs and blood. This morning, in the fresh field, I came upon a hidden nest. It held four warm, speckled eggs. I touched them. Then went away softly, Having felt something more wonderful Than all the electricity of New York City.

I am too inexperienced and ignorant to conduct myself with propriety in this town, where every thing is new to me, and many things are unaccountable and perplexing.

Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.

The answer is, of course, to simplify, to prioritize, and in some cases, to use a well-known phrase, "Just say no!" But actually doing it may prove to be one of the real challenges in our complicated, overheated lives.

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

My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.

My life can be insanely complicated sometimes, and there's a certain simplicity that I crave.

Our ancestors lived out of doors. They were as familiar with the night sky as most of us are with our favorite television programs.

Overload 'em with information an' they'll kill yeh jus' to simplify things.

Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off views & leave you muddled & without bearings. They make you feel small & confused & vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs. Stand in a desert or prairie & you know you are in a big space. Stand in the woods and you only sense it. They are vast, featureless nowhere. And they are alive.

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

The Internet is a really strange place to be.