Essential Elements Quotes

Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

In civilizational issues you don't look at the tiny details as the debate. You have to look at the big picture!

Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

Knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to focus on.

There are only three indispensable things: the audience, the actor and the author. The rest is dross.

If I try to articulate every little detail in a drawing, it would be like missing the forest for the trees, so it's just about getting the outline of the forest.

Life was reduced to its four basic elements: air, food, drink, and a good friend.

There are little details in everything you do, and if you get away from any one of the little details, you're not teaching the thing as a whole. For it is little things which, together, make the whole. This, I think, is extremely important.

I started from zero and went back to the basics in gymnastics.

Legislation to create a new 10 percent tax bracket, reduce the marriage penalty, cut the tax rate on dividends and capital gains, and increase the child tax credit have been essential elements in this economic expansion.

The things that most deserve our gratitude we just take for granted. Without air we cannot live for more than a minute or two. Everyday we are breathing in and breathing out, but do we ever feel grateful to the air? If we do not drink water, we cannot survive. Even our body is composed to a large extent of water.But do we give any value to water? Every morning when we open our eyes, we see the sun blessingfully offering us light and life-energy, which we badly need. But are we grateful to the sun?

The detail is as important as the essential is. When it is inadequate, it destroys the whole outfit.

Design principle: Take things away until the design breaks, then put that last thing back in.

When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.

For more than fifty years the question of slavery has been more or less a subject of discord and contention; and, more recently, in some shape or other, it has been continually coming up in the councils of the nation, in the State Legislatures of the non-slaveholding States, before the people of the North, as an issue in elections, local and federal, and before the people of the South as an offset to its agitation at the North, to be considered with reference to its vindication as one of the essential elements of our society, its maintenance as an institution for the public good, and the protection of our rights, originating in it and under it, as the great God-given guaranty of the freedom of the white man through the thralldom of the black -- the accomplishment of the destiny of the African and Anglo-Saxon races by an observance and enforcement of the relations between them designed and decreed by divinity.

The details are details. They make the product. The connections, the connections, the connections. It will in the end be these details that give the product its life.

As a rule, one should never place form over content.

You’re getting rid of the things that people used to think were essential to art. But that reduction is only incidental. I object to the whole reduction idea…if my work is reductionist it’s because it doesn’t have the elements that people thought should be there. But it has other elements I like.

Appreciating complexity while searching through its thickets to find essential factors leads to understanding.

Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.

Ignorance and error are necessary to life, like bread and water.

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

Eliminate the unnecessary and focus on the substance.

I always think, 'What does this picture mean? What's the best place to put my camera? Do I have anything extra in the picture, things in the background that will distract? Am I in the basic position that will give the essential things for this picture but not too much?'