T. E. Hulme Quotes

I'm quite an untidy person in a lot of ways. But order makes me happy. I have to have a clear desk and a tidy desktop, with as few visual distractions as possible. I don't mind sound distractions, but visual ones freak me out.

Never label anything 'Miscellaneous.'

The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.

I can't stand things being out of place.

I love things that are really linear and perfect and simple.

Chaos is the natural state, and theater tries to make sense of it, but it's got to be a little messy to be believable.

Clarity is important. Part of what I'm trying to do with some of these pictures is eliminate as much of the potential, as many kind of readings as people might want to make, as possible.

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge

People like definite decisions, / Tidy answers, all the little ravelings / Snipped off, the lint removed, they / Hop happily among their roughs / Calling what they can't clutch insanity / Or saintliness.

Simplicity is not the absence of clutter.

I am always willing to run some hazard of being tedious, in order to be sure that I am perspicuous; and, after taking the utmost pains that I can to be perspicuous, some obscurity may still appear to remain upon a subject, in its own nature extremely abstracted.

To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.

I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity; in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It's about bringing order to complexity.

Pick very few objects and place them exactly.

It's simple until you make it complicated.

When I first heard music, I thought it should be very clean, very precise. Something that people could understand, something that was beautiful.

I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality.

Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack.

The advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil.

I thought I could start over, you see. But now I know you can never start over. Not really. You think you have control, but you are like a fly in somebody else's web. Sometimes I think that's why I like accounting. All day, you are only dealing with numbers. You add them, multiply them, and if you are careful, you will always have a solution. There's a sequence there. An order. With numbers, you can have control.

A drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Slender certainty is better than portentous falsehood.

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.