A Quote by Jean Cocteau

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

Jean Cocteau

Quote Topics

Complicated Complicated Things Saying Simple Simple Way Style Things Way

Quote Author

Jean Cocteau
French - Novelist
July 5, 1889 - October 11, 1963

What is style? For many people, a very complicated way of saying very simple things. According to us, a very simple way of saying very complicated things.

Jean Cocteau

The essence of style is a simple way of saying something complex.

Giorgio Armani

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

John Barth

What makes life complicated is the things that are on me and it is very hard to keep things simple. I see it as I am complicated and there is innocence to this.

Klaus Nomi

I had forgotten this about love: how the simple things- the turn away, the turn towards- could be so complicated, and how the complicated things- the stolen night, the right words- could be so simple.

David Levithan

Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science can't deal with them... But it's a complicated matter: Science studies what's at the edge of understanding, and what's at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated.

Noam Chomsky

Many young people today do not concern themselves with style. They think that what one says should be said simply and that is all. For me, style - which does not exclude simplicity, quite the opposite - is above all a way of saying three or four things in one. There is the simple sentence, with its immediate meaning, and then at the same time, below this immediate meaning, other meanings are organized. If one is not capable of giving language this plurality of meaning, then it is not worth the trouble to write.

Jean-Paul Sartre

[…] but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.

Jonathan Safran Foer

..things are never as complicated as they seem. It is only our arrogance that prompts us to find unnecessarily complicated answers to simple problems.

Muhammad Yunus

There was, I think, a feeling that the best science was that done in the simplest way. In experimental work, as in mathematics, there was "style" and a result obtained with simple equipment was more elegant than one obtained with complicated apparatus, just as a mathematical proof derived neatly was better than one involving laborious calculations. Rutherford's first disintegration experiment, and Chadwick's discovery of the neutron had a "style" that is different from that of experiments made with giant accelerators.

J. A. Ratcliffe

It’s as simple as that. Simple and complicated, as most true things are.

David Levithan

I love the way in which I make up dances. It's a complicated way and the product is usually clear. Clear and simple. I don't need everybody to know that there are all of these fabulous things going on. If you CAN see it, that's wonderful.

Mark Morris

Tokyo style is so specific. And I'm a very big fan of their history. It's pretty simple. A lot of the time, people expect to see the wild style that comes out of Japan, but I think, traditionally, the style is very simple.

Thundercat

The sun is simple. A sword is simple. A storm is simple. Behind everything simple is a huge tail of complicated.

Terry Pratchett

It is the Buddhist belief that all things, experiences and people are inherently empty. That is a simple way of saying that all physical and nonphysical things have another side.