"Simplification" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Bleeding Heart Yard that same forenoon. Little peculiarities were easily to be detected by experienced eyes in Mr Doyce's way of managing his affairs, but they almost always involved some ingenious simplification of a difficulty, and some plain road to the desired end. That his papers were in arrear, and that he stood in need of assistance to develop the capacity of his business, was clear enough; but all the results of ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... have disappeared for a considerable time from the church music is not at all remarkable, for in the first steps toward regulating the liturgy simplification was a prime requisite. Thus in the centuries before Gregory the plain chant gained complete ascendancy in the church and under him it acquired a systematization which had in it the elements ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... relatively to the animal kingdom, we should chiefly devote our attention to the invertebrate animals, because their enormous multiplicity in nature, the singular diversity of their systems of organization and of their means of multiplication, their increasing simplification, and the extreme fugacity of those which compose the lowest orders of these animals, show us, much better than the higher animals, the true course of nature, and the means which she has used and which she still unceasingly employs to give existence to all the living ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... modern in its presentment. There was a remarkable simplification of scenery. This was, perhaps, due to the new poverty of Berlin. But it comprised merely a wall, a hole in the wall called the Tower of London, a platform on top of the wall called Tower Hill, carpeted stairs against the wall called the Court at Westminster. Clarence mopes ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... has always sought order and simplification of the external world; in chemistry the fruitful classifications were Dobereiner's Triads (1829), Newland's law of octaves (1865), and Mendeleev's periodic law (1869). The chart expressing this periodic ...
— A Brief History of Element Discovery, Synthesis, and Analysis • Glen W. Watson
... making Hilary Jesson a candidate for Parliament, and bringing on a reporter to interview his private secretary. The incident is perfectly natural and probable; all one can say of it is that it is perhaps an over-simplification of the dramatist's task.[3] The Second Mrs. Tanqueray requires an unusual amount of preliminary retrospect. We have to learn the history of Aubrey Tanqueray's first marriage, with the mother of Ellean, as well as the history of Paula Ray's past life. The mechanism ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... of gentlemen in uncongenial employments, mostly manual and fatiguing. This would give them the kind of activity that they would like—such as their class enjoys in other countries where my system is in full flower, and where it is deemed so sacred that any proposal for its abolition or simplification by trusts is regarded with horror, especially ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... conventions. It belonged to the sphere of the rights of man. Its enemy was everywhere the corrupt heart and the worldly, calculating mind. Fortunately the new ecstasy associated itself with a strong enthusiasm for the simplification of life; for the poetry of nature and of rustic employments; for the sweetness of domestic affection. In Germany public sentiment had already been prepared for a certain idealization of the bourgeoisie. Enlightened rulers and publicists, here and there, were coming to feel that a virtuous yeomanry ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... "Well, who does not know that? That was known and said long ago." It really seems to him that this has been said long ago and in just this way. Only those to whom moral truths are dear and important know how important and precious they are, and with what prolonged labor the elucidation, the simplification, of moral truths, their transit from the state of a misty, indefinitely recognized supposition, and desire, from indistinct, incoherent expressions, to a firm and definite expression, unavoidably demanding corresponding ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... with greater powers of dispersal and a constitution capable of supporting diverse physical conditions, may have led to a similar result. With some groups the tendency seems to have been almost continuously to greater and greater specialisation, while with others a tendency to simplification and degradation has resulted in such plants as the grasses ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... remarkably, but this was a highly technical discussion. It was two days before Soames had the information he needed firmly in his mind. He made a working drawing of what had to be built. He realized that the drawing itself was a simplification of a much more sophisticated original device. It was adapted to be made out of locally available materials. It was what Fran had made and ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... in the over-simplification of the problem of Americanization by propagandist organizations. We are in constant danger from too simple analysis of problems and too simple as the epigrams that grow up about it. Panaceas usually touch only a part of a problem. It is interesting ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... much there was of it and that she was infinitely interesting. He didn't want to fall in love with her—that would be a sell, he said to himself—and she promptly became much too interesting for it. Nick might have reflected, for simplification's sake, as his cousin Peter had done, but with more validity, that he was engaged with Miss Rooth in an undertaking which didn't in the least refer to themselves, that they were working together seriously and that decent work quite gainsaid sensibility—the humbugging sorts alone ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... BETWEEN RECORDS AND PROGRAMMES ON THE WORK.—The most noteworthy result of the closer relations between records and programmes which appear during the evolution of Scientific Management is the fact that they cause constant simplification. The more carefully records are standardized, the simpler becomes the drafting of the programme. As more and more records become standard, the drafting of programmes becomes constantly ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... condition and prospects of the various commercial, manufacturing, agricultural, mining and other interests of the country, and recommended an enlargement of the free list, so as to include within it numerous articles which yielded inconsiderable revenue, a simplification of the complex and inconsistent schedule of duties upon certain manufactures, particularly those of cotton, iron and steel, and a substantial reduction of the duties upon those and various other articles. The subsequent action of Congress did not, in my opinion, conform to this, in some ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... the all-saving power of Amida as compared with the ways promulgated before, we see the emergence of the Buddhist doctrine of justification by faith, the simplification of theology, and a revolt against Buddhist scholasticism. The Japanese technical term, "tariki," or relying upon the strength of another, renouncing all idea of ji-riki or self-power,[8] is the substance of the J[o]-d[o] doctrine; but the ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... remember them less for the sentence than for a grandiose effect. They are not so much concerned with the art of words as with the creation of great images informed with magnificence of spirit. They are not lesser artists but greater, for there is a greater art in the simplification of form in the statue of Memnon than there is in the intricate detail of a bronze by Benvenuto Cellini. Standish O'Grady had in his best moments that epic wholeness and simplicity, and the figure of Cuculain amid his companions of the Red Branch ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... headed "Degradation and Simplification of the Animal Chain as we proceed downwards from the most complex to the most ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... us can only observe. "I look and I think I see," writes Bergson, "I listen and I think I hear, I examine myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart.... (But) my senses and my consciousness ... give me no more than a practical simplification of reality ... in short, we do not see the actual things themselves; in most cases we confine ourselves to reading the labels affixed to them." Who has not known this in thinking of politics? We talk of poverty and forget poor people; we make rules for vagrancy—we forget the ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... passionate intensity—its rich browns and reds, greens and blues endowing its characters with glowing fervour, while Krishna and the cowgirls, with their sharp robust forms and great intent eyes, display a brusque vitality and an eager rapturous vigour. A certain simplification of structure—each picture possessing one or more rectangular compartments—enhances this effect while the addition of swirling trees studded with flowers imbues each wild encounter with a surging vegetative rhythm. Krishna is no longer the tepid ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... diminish, classes segregate. There arises a caste of wage-earners never to be anything but wage-earners; a caste of property-owners, handing on their property to their descendants; and substantially, after all deductions have been made for exaggeration and simplification, a division of society into capitalists and proletarians. American society is beginning to crystallise out into the forms of European society. For, once more, America is nothing new; she is a repetition of the old on a larger scale. And, curiously, she ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... possession. In the first five chapters there are numerous emendations, very few of which, however, affect the meaning to any appreciable extent, being mainly concerned with the excision of redundancies and the simplification of style. I imagine that by the time he had reached the end of the fifth chapter Butler realised that the corrections he had made were not of sufficient importance to warrant a new edition, and determined to let the book stand as it was. I believe, therefore, that I am carrying ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... precedence of the rest? It was a fine academic question for church lawyers to discuss. Jesus passed by all ceremonial and ecclesiastical requirements, and put his hand on love as the central law of life, both in religion and ethics. It was a great simplification and spiritualization of religion. But love is the social instinct which binds man and man together and makes them indispensable to one another. Whoever demands love, demands solidarity. Whoever sets love ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... Learning; and the sympathies of Cromwell were mainly with those of his master. They had no wish for any violent break with the ecclesiastical forms of the past. They desired religious reform rather than religious revolution, a simplification of doctrine rather than any radical change in it, the purification of worship rather than the introduction of any wholly new ritual. Their theology remained, as they believed, a Catholic theology, but a theology cleared of the superstitious growths which ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... possession, the cultivation, and the exhibition of the qualities of leadership give men enormous power. There was in the nineteenth century a historical fashion, brilliantly exemplified by Carlyle, to assume that history was made by great men. Latterly, there has been wide dissent from this simplification of the processes of history, but it is clear that innovations must be started by individuals, and that a powerful leader is a matchless instrument for initiating, and getting wide and enthusiastic support for changes, whether good or bad. To quote Carlyle's ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... accompanied by a simplification of the machinery of collection, which would then be easy of accomplishment, might reasonably be expected to result in diminishing the cost of such collection by at least $2,500,000 and in the retirement from office of from 1,500 to ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson
... were to be paid, but the number of judges was to be largely decreased, perhaps by two-thirds. This would be possible, because the simplification of procedure and the curtailment of their powers would enormously lessen the amount of work to be done. Dru called the Board's attention to the fact that England had about two hundred judges of all kinds, while there were some thirty-six hundred ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... at once a simplification and expansion of Josephus and the Talmud, stories simply told, faithful presentation of the virtues, and not infrequently the vices, of characters sometimes legendary, generally ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... you are in love with repose, here is your occasion: change with me. I am too blind to read, hence no reading; I am too weak to walk, hence no walking; I am not allowed to speak, hence no talking; but the great simplification has yet to be named; for, if this goes on, I shall soon have nothing to eat - and hence, O Hallelujah! hence no eating. The offer is a fair one: I have not sold myself to the devil, for I could never find him. I am married, but so are you. I sometimes write verses, but so do you. Come! HIC ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... improvement on the primitive quadrant then in use for taking the altitude of the sun. The astrolabe, it will be remembered, had been greatly improved, by Martin Behaim and the Portuguese Commission in 1840—[1440 D.W.]; and it was this instrument, a simplification of the astrolabe used in astronomy ashore, that Columbus chiefly used in getting his solar altitudes. As will be seen from the illustration, its broad principle was that of a metal circle with a graduated circumference and two ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... of simplification, however, which should be closely observed; and that is to accomplish the object of any governmental function in the most direct and economical manner. There is great room for improvement in this respect. Nature, in the midst of all her growing complexities, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... especially eating, are always cropping up; one is perpetually being reminded of them in one way or another, and it is significant that when the Cistercian revival began, one of the chief reforms aimed at was the rigorous simplification of the meals and the curtailing the luxury of ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... me. I can't be bound by the pious fancies of men who knew no science, and very little about evidence of any kind. What I want is just a simple and beautiful principle of living, such as I feel thrills through the words of Christ. The Prodigal Son—that's almost enough for me! It is simplification that I want, and independence. Of course I see that if that isn't what a man wants, if he requires that something or someone should be infallible, then he does require a good deal of argument and information and history. But though I don't ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... which had haunted every nobler soul since the "Utopia" of More. Hales based his loyalty to the Church of England on the fact that it was the largest and the most tolerant Church in Christendom. Chillingworth pointed out how many obstacles to comprehension were removed by such a simplification of belief as flowed from a rational theology, and asked, like More, for "such an ordering of the public service of God as that all who believe the Scripture and live according to it might without scruple or hypocrisy or protestation in any ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... have tried to disengage the various elements of the craft, one from another, and to look at them separately; and this has involved much rude simplification of matters that are by no means simple. I have chosen a novel for the sake of some particular aspect, and I have disregarded all else in it; I could but seek for the book which seemed to display that aspect most plainly, ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... "After this summary simplification, it would have been possible to indulge the chimera of the beau ideal of civilization. In this state of things there would have been some chance of establishing in every country a unity of codes, of principles, of opinions, of sentiments, views and ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... which the simplification of language in an advertisement should be carried depends upon the audience addressed. It is evident that a larger and less educated portion of the public is included in the possible customers for breakfast food and chewing gum than there are in the portion who would be likely to purchase a ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... historically Richelieu's policies had had quite something to say in the creation of Prussia; the conscript armies of the French Revolution had first made Europe into an armed camp. It was an undue simplification to insist exclusively on ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... immorality and the suggested remedies. After considering the evidence, after reading much literature on the subject, and weighing up all the suggested factors, the view of the Committee is that the matter is not capable of simplification by regarding any, or even all, the causes suggested and discussed below as being the main cause. In seeking to remedy the evil it must steadily be borne in mind that we have not only to deal with the immediately apparent causes. Letters to the press, letters to this Committee, and many ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... the so-called direct-current receiver has brought about a great simplification in the common-battery telephone circuits of several of the manufacturing companies. By this use the transmitter and the receiver are placed in series across the line, this path being normally opened by the hook-switch contacts. The polarized bell and condenser are placed ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... elaboration of machinery in a society whose purpose is not the multiplication of labour, as it now is, but the carrying on of a pleasant life, as it would be under social order— that the elaboration of machinery, I say, will lead the simplification of life, and so once more to the limitation ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... indistinctness and loss is not, however, wholly bad; for it has at the same time largely contributed, especially in English, to such a simplification of grammatical inflexions as certainly has the practical convenience of giving us less to learn. But in addition to this decay in the forms of words, we have also to reckon with a depreciation or weakening of the ideas they express. Many words become so hackneyed ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... trade-schools be introduced, has made most of our manual-training high schools ghastly, hollow, artificial institutions. Instead of making in the lower grades certain toys which are masterpieces of mechanical simplification, as tops and kites, and introducing such processes as glass-making and photography, and in higher grades making simple scientific apparatus more generic than machines, to open the great principles of the material universe, all ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... observations, then, as we have already explained,[150] in a state of deplorable confusion, attracted his most earnest attention, and he was close on the track of Bessel when made acquainted with the method of simplification devised at Koenigsberg. Anticipated as an inventor, he could still be of eminent use as a promoter of these valuable improvements; and, carrying them out on a large scale in the star-catalogue of the Astronomical Society (published in 1827), "he put" (in the words of ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... more than in all others, it happens that truths which are at one period the most abstract, and apparently the most remote from all useful application, become in the next age the bases of profound physical inquiries, and in the succeeding one, perhaps, by proper simplification and reduction to tables, furnish their ready and daily aid to ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... some animals, undoubtedly give only a consciousness of diffused light, without the possibility of boundaries or divisions in the field of view. The abstraction of colour from form is therefore by no means an artificial one, since, by a simplification of the organ of sense, one may ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... difference in the very definition of virility and therefore of virtue. A live wire is not only active, it is also sensitive. Thus sensibility becomes actually a part of virility. Something more is involved than the vulgar simplification of the American as the irresistible force and the Englishman as the immovable post. As a fact, those who speak of such things nowadays generally mean by something irresistible something simply immovable, or at least something unalterable, ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... of all phenomena to personal agencies. As phenomena are good or evil, produce pleasure or pain, cause weal or woe, a distinction in the character of these agencies is gradually recognized; the agents of good become gods, those of evil, demons. A tendency towards the simplification and organization of the evil as of the good forces, leads towards belief in outstanding leaders among the forces of evil. When the divine is most completely conceived as unity, the demonic is also so conceived; and over against God stands ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... what they call "Palliatives"—of any instalment system of reform. They wait until they can make the whole journey in one stride, and would, in the meanwhile, have no one set forth upon the way. In America the Marxist fatalism has found a sort of supreme simplification in the gospel of Mr. H. G. Wilshire. The Trusts, one learns, are to consolidate all the industry in the country, own all the property. Then when they own everything, the Nation will take them over. "Let the Nation own the Trusts!" The Nation in the ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... deeply influential and significant than are the vastest modern capitals. This very wealth of historical interests and resources, the corresponding multiplicity of specialisms, more than ever proves the need of some means by which to group and classify them. Some panoramic simplification of our ideas of history comparable to that of our geography, and if possible congruent with this, is plainly what we want. Again the answer comes through geography, though no longer in mere map or relief, but now in vertical section—in the order of ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... and this change has been almost universally adopted by teachers of sight-singing in this country. The more elaborate tonic-sol-fa spelling of the diatonic syllables (DOH, LAH, etc.), has not, however, been favorably received in this country and the tendency seems to be toward still further simplification rather than toward elaboration. It is probable that further changes in both spelling and pronunciation will be made in the near future, one such change that seems especially desirable being some other syllable than RE for the second tone of the major ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... whose invention was purchased by William Deering, one of McCormick's chief competitors, invented binders which used twine. By 1880 the self-binding harvester was complete. No distinctive improvement has been made since, except to add strength and simplification. The machine now needed the services of only two men, one to drive and the other to shock the bundles, and could reap twenty acres or more a day, tie the grain into bundles of uniform size, and dump them in piles of five ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... completely to reorganize the church. The anxiety for simplification and complete uniformity shows itself in the reckless way that it dealt with this most venerable institution of France, the customs of which were hallowed not only by age, but by religious veneration. The one hundred and thirty-four ancient bishoprics, some of which dated ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... N.E.A. ("Reorganization of Science in Secondary Schools", U.S. Dep't. Interior, Bureau of Education, Bulletin 26, 1920). These aims will not be considered in their entirety but only in so far as they bear directly on the problems that follow. Before proceeding further, for simplification we will assume that the teacher is assigned to teach biological sciences only. Even then the field is quite comprehensive, for besides instruction in general biology, there will be courses of a more advanced type, in Zoology, Botany, Physiology, and often Bacteriology, Sanitation, ...
— Adequate Preparation for the Teacher of Biological Sciences in Secondary Schools • James Daley McDonald
... but it is not necessarily so; that will depend upon what, I won't say the object, but the impression, may have been. The talents engaged in this school lie, not unjustly, as it seems to me under the suspicion of seeking the solution of their problem exclusively in simplification. If a painter works for other eyes as well as his own he courts a certain danger in this direction—that of being arrested by the cry of the spectator: "Ah! but excuse me; I myself take more impressions than that" We feel a synthesis not to be an injustice only ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... clear. Just as in poetry there is a rhythm of stress which represents a regularizing of the natural undulations in the stress of speech, so there is also a more deep-lying rhythm, which arises through a simplification and regularizing of the movement of thought-pulsations. The fundamental rhythm consists in an alternation ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... God, there may be associations and fraternities for research in pure science; associations for the teaching and simplification of languages; associations for promoting and watching education; associations for the discussion of political problems and the determination of right policies. In all these ways men may multiply their use by union. Only when associations seek to control ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... interest and the sinking fund for redemption have to be found by taxation, and so the borrowing process merely postpones taxation from the war period to the peace period. During the war period taxation can be raised comparatively easily owing to the patriotic stimulus and the simplification of the industrial problem which is provided by the Government's insatiable demand for commodities. When the days of peace return, however, there will be very grave disturbance and dislocation in industry, and ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... energy, tourism, and manufacturing sectors. Detailed governmental control of economic affairs has gradually lessened over the past decade, including increasing privatization of trade and commerce, simplification of the tax structure, and a cautious approach to debt. Real growth has averaged roughly 5% in 1991-94, and inflation has been moderate. Growth in tourism and IMF support have been key elements in this solid record. Further privatization and further ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... of government as held by any persons in the House; and that the other, the simpler system, which I wish the House to undertake, would be one of action, progress, and results, with regard to India, such as we have never yet seen and never can see until there is a complete simplification of the Indian Government in ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... hues— blue, red, and yellow— in gradations of intensity so that varying amounts of color, each on a separate copper plate, could be printed in superimposition to reconstitute the original picture. This was based upon a simplification of Newton's seven primaries. Later, Le Blon added a fourth, black plate. Incredibly, this is the principle of modern commercial color printing, the only difference being that Le Blon did not have a camera, color ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... keeping accounts and making returns, and settling balances. Few persons can realize the labor and perplexity occasioned to clerks in the General Post-Office, by having a column of fractions in every man's quarterly return which they examine. The simplification of business would probably save to the department all they would lose by striking out this paltry fraction, so that the general pamphlet postage will stand at two cents for the first ounce, and one cent ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt |
