Charles Mingus Quotes

Anybody can make the simple complecated. Creativity is making the complecated simple.

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

It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas.

Any idiot can be complicated. It takes a genius to be simple.

To complicate things in new ways, that is really very easy; but to see things in new ways, that is difficult and that is why genius is so rare.

Big ideas are usually simple ideas.

Even in technology, you have the freedom to solve a problem your way, you see. But it naturally sits in a certain framework whereas, in the physics, everybody had to come up with his own idea what he was going to do.

My work is more about trying to ask good questions and not trying to come up with big shows. Every fashion company is doing that, every car company is doing that.

It's easy to say, 'I'm going to build something that already exists,' but it's difficult to clearly and succinctly describe something new.

It's like that Simpsons joke - they're filming a cow in a movie and they go, 'OK, we'll tape a bunch of cats together to make a cow', and it's like, 'Why don't you just use a cow?'. For some reason that is novel - like, 'Oh, my guitar sounds like a piano and now if I can just get my piano to sound like my guitar'.

If it's simple simple, it's boring. We try for the idea that is so simple that it will make you think and rethink.

I'd rather not ever make anything overly simple just because I'm scared people won't get it.

I know how to think outside of the box and be creative.

You know, when you look carefully at stuff that you deal with everyday, applying a little creativity to it and thinking outside the box, it's amazing what you can do.

The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done-men who are creative, inventive, and discovers. The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered.

Having a good idea is one thing, but persuading other people to buy it is quite another. Good inventors are polymaths: they think with their hands and their brains. They're experts in design, engineering and business.

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.

The best ideas and the most useful and ground-breaking are often, though not always, in one sense, very simple ideas.

Designers are inherently optimistic people who try to make the world a better place

The essence of creativity is figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you already think.

Creating a piece of software is always complicated because you're doing something new. If you just wanted something that had been done before you'd just use that old piece of software. So there are no repetitive tasks.

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.

Ideation is not a synonym for innovation, conformity is not its simple antonym, and innovation is not the automatic consequence of "creative thinking.".