John von Neumann Quotes

Life is weird and complex but very simple at the same time. It's all about perception.

I believe it would be considerably healthier for us to dare to live without a reason for many things than with reasons that are simplistic.

Understanding is simple. Knowing is complicated.

Common sense is so very simple but very difficult to grasp.

It is not at all simple to understand the simple.

Africa is people" may seem too simple and too obvious to some of us. But I have found in the course of my travels through the world that the most simple things can still givwe us a lot of trouble, even the brightest among us: this is particularly so in matters concerning Africa.

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

Living isn't a simple thing...no one said it's supposed to be.

What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.

We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.

God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.

because it seemed too simple to accept that life was an act of faith.

Life is never straightforward or emotionally black and white.

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

We are not very pleased when we are forced to accept a mathematical truth by virtue of a complicated chain of formal conclusions and computations, which we traverse blindly, link by link, feeling our way by touch. We want first an overview of the aim and of the road; we want to understand the idea of the proof, the deeper context.

If your work is so smart that only smart people get it, it's not that smart.

Truth is too simple for us: we do not like those who unmask our illusions.

Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.

Dear Hilde, if the human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn't understand it. Love, Dad.

And simple truth miscalled simplicity

I believe that reality is vastly richer than the cursory attention we usually give it permits us to understand. I like to write through a consciousness that allows me to suggest something of this richness.

Do not underestimate the human being, who sometimes appears so simple. Even with sight as sharp as an eagle, a mind as sharp as a razor, senses more powerful than gods, hearing that can catch the music and the lamentations of life, your knowledge of humanity will never be total.

I don't know why, but life is usually more complicated than the plans that we make.

Find the heart of it. Make the complex simple, and you can achieve mastery.

I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem. We are trying to understand how we have got a complicated world, and we have an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we explain that in terms of a slightly simpler world and it all hangs together down to an ultimately simple world. Now, God is not an explanation of that kind. God himself cannot be simple if he has power to do all the things he is supposed to do.