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Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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Nature uses as little as possible of anything.
—Johannes Kepler
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The mind's direction is more important than its progress.
—Joseph Joubert
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Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.
—Marcel Proust
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With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
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Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.
—Henri Poincaré
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We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
—Georg Hegel
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To establish oneself in the world, one does all one can to seem established there already.
—François de La Rochefoucauld
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Nothing is enough to the man for whom enough is too little.
—Epicurus
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He who can take no interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great.
—John Ruskin
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The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
—William Blake
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When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
—Goodheart's law
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It is a false dichotomy to think of nature and man. Mankind is that factor in nature which exhibits in its most intense form the plasticity of nature.
— Alfred North Whitehead
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Civilized man's brain is a museum of contradictory truths.
— Remy de Gourmont
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Good sense is the concierge of the mind: its business is not to let suspicious-looking ideas enter or leave.
— Stern
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The public buys its opinions as it buys its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.
— Samuel Butler (II)
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To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.
— William Hazlitt
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Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make more clear.
— Joseph Joubert
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Viel Denken, nicht viel Wissen ist zu pflegen.
—Democritus
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Einfachheit ist der Mut zum Wesentlichen.
—Helmar Nahr