"Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better."
— Murray Gell-Mann
Simplicity Is A Great Virtue But
Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.
About this quote
This epigram is attributed to Murray Gell-Mann in several collections, but no specific primary source has been documented. Gell-Mann was known for his elegance and his contempt for unnecessary complexity — qualities that drove his Nobel Prize-winning work classifying elementary particles, where he imposed order on a confusing zoo of hadrons using a mathematical framework called the Eightfold Way. Whether or not the exact words are his, the sentiment accurately reflects his aesthetic in physics.
Source
Attributed