Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem — William of Ockham
We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities. — Oscar Wilde
Everything in excess is opposed to nature. — Hippocrates
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. — William Strunk, Jr.
Material blessings, when they pay beyond the category of need, are weirdly fruitful of headache. — Philip Wylie
A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature. — Charles Lamb
Interrupted Quotes
People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it. — George Bernard Shaw
Teenagers these days are out of control. They eat like pigs, they are disrespectful of adults, they interrupt and contradict their parents, and they terrorize their teachers. — Aristotle
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. — Napoleon Bonaparte
We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.....We must not.....assume that our schedule is our own to manage, but allow it to be arranged by God. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence. — Jean-Paul Sartre
In the midst of these pleasing ideas we should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections. — Samuel Adams
It is not the accumulation of extraneous knowledge, but the realization of the self within, that constitutes true progress. — Okakura Kakuzo
Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features. — Primo Levi
Our task is to strike a balance, to find a middle way, to learn not to overextend ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations, but to simplify our lives more and more. The key to finding a happy balance in modern life is simplicity. — Sogyal Rinpoche
Our lives are lived in intense and anxious struggle, in a swirl of speed and aggression, in competing, grasping, possessing and achieving, forever burdening ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations. — Sogyal Rinpoche
Music is the purest form of art, and therefore the most direct expression of beauty, with a form and spirit which is one and simple, and least encumbered with anything extraneous. We seem to feel that the manifestation of the infinite in the finite forms of creation is music itself, silent and visible. — Rabindranath Tagore
Reconnaissance memoranda should always be written in the simplest style and be purely descriptive. They should never stray from their objective by introducing extraneous ideas. — Napoleon Bonaparte
What's really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer. — William Albert Allard
Perhaps ultimately, spiritual simply means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and the totality are interwoven, that nothing is separate or extraneous. If you see in this way, then everything becomes spiritual in its deepest sense. Doing science is spiritual. So is washing the dishes. — Jon Kabat-Zinn
Creative activity is not a superimposed, extraneous task against which the body, or brain protests, but an orchestration of ... joyful doing. — Gyorgy Kepes
The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development-and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion. — Nick Bostrom
At some point I realized that the text was the painting and that everything else was extraneous. The painting became the act of writing a text on a canvas, but in all my work, text turns into abstraction. — Glenn Ligon
Advertising is the art of the tiny. You have to tell a complete a story and deliver a complete message in a very encapsulated form. It disciplines you to cut away extraneous information. — Dick Wolf
All things that are living are expression and therefore part of the inherent symbology of life. Art, therefore, that is encumbered with excessive symbolism is extraneous, and from my point of view, useless art. Anyone who understands life needs no handbook of poetry or philosophy to tell him what it is. — Marsden Hartley
All discussion of the ultimate nature of things must necessarily be barren unless we have some extraneous standards against which to compare them. — James Jeans
It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. — Henry David Thoreau
There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure--pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter. — Virginia Woolf
It takes talent to please the people in a sermon by a flowery style, a cheerful ethic, brilliant sallies and lively descriptions; but such a talent is inadequate. A better sort of talent neglects these extraneous ornaments, unworthy to be used in the service of the Gospel: such a preacher's sermon will be simple, strong and Christian. — Jean De La Bruyere
If intellection and knowledge were mere passion from without, or the bare reception of extraneous and adventitious forms, then no reason could be given at all why a mirror or looking-glass should not understand; whereas it cannot so much as sensibly perceive those images which it receives and reflects to us. — Ralph J. Cudworth
Sometimes I have a notion that what might improve the situation is to have women take over the occupations of government and trade and to give men their freedom. Let them do what they are best at. While we scrawl interoffice memos and direct national or extranational affairs, men could spend all their time inventing wheels, peering at stars, composing poems, carving statues, exploring continents -- discovering, reforming, or crying out in a sacramental wilderness. Efficiency would probably increase, and no one would have to worry so much about the Gaza Strip or an election. — Phyllis Mcginley
After puberty the personality develops impetuously and all extraneous intervention becomes odious. . . . Now it so happens that parents feel the responsibility towards their children precisely during this second period, when it is too late. — Antonio Gramsci
We've got to cut the extraneous out of our lives, and we've got to learn to stem the inflow. We need to think before we buy. Ask ourselves, 'Is that really going to make me happier? Truly?' — Graham Hill
I think that words are often extraneous to what I do. — Howard Hodgkin
Sense perceptions can be and often are false and deceptive, however real they may appear to us. Where there is realization outside the senses, it is infallible. It is proved not by extraneous evidence but in the transformed conduct and character of those who have felt the real presence of God within. — Mahatma Gandhi
Technology allows us to weed out a lot of the extraneous circumstances that can happen in certain environments. If you have an opportunity to say, "I'm going to be in charge of my own narrative. I'm going to be the one who sees that this is OK for me," like anything else, it just gives you a position of feeling like you can be in charge of those things. — Kate Hudson
I underwent a whole process of slowly letting go of idiosyncrasies and habits and embellishments and everything extraneous to the essentials that I'm unwilling to let go of. I never dreamed that I would be making black-and-white paintings with so little embellishment. But it's been liberating in many ways to let go of that and yet see what I did want to retain. — Caio Fonseca
I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition. I'm trying always to leave out what I think is extraneous. And to find what I think is the most wonderful language to make a beautiful sentence. Not beautiful in the sense of "oh it's flowy" but in the sense that it really does what it's supposed to do, it what I want it to say. — Lynne Tillman
Nobody is delineated, nobody is concentrated. There is a lot of extraneous stuff. Like for instance, the satellites that measure in the atmosphere, there is billions and billions and billions of bytes of data, only maybe 2% of which are actually useful. They don't know what the rest are for, they don't know what good they are. — Owsley Stanley
You have to decide what is extraneous and what is central. There is always more to tell. If you want to have a finished product, at some point you have to say "enough." — Adele Logan Alexander
You have such a sacred responsibility when you touch John Lewis's story, when you touch the story of the movement. You don't want to leave anything out, but you want to tell a good story so the people will read it and they're engaged and they don't fall apart with extraneous details. — Andrew Aydin
People who are great thinkers, in science or in art, people who are great performers, have to have that kind of capacity. Without that kind of capacity, it's extremely difficult to manage a high level of performance because you're going to get a lot of extraneous material chipping away at the finery of your thinking or the finery of your motor execution. — Antonio Damasio
In terms of screenwriting adaptations it's trying to cut out stuff that's extraneous, without doing damage to the original piece, because you owe a debt of some respect to the original author. That's why it was bought. — Rod Serling
I'm trying always to leave out what I think is extraneous. And to find what I think is the most wonderful language to make a beautiful sentence. — Lynne Tillman
The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing, it is the thing to watch over and care for and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous. . . . — Mark Twain
For the ordinary man, whose mind is a checkerboard of crisscrossing reflections, opinions, and prejudices, bare attention is virtually impossible; his life is thus centered not in reality itself but in his ideas of it. By focusing the mind wholly on each objects and every action, zazen strips it of extraneous thoughts and allows us to enter into a full rapport with life. — Philip Kapleau
We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our Liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections. If an election is to be determined by a majority of a single vote, and that can be procured by a party through artifice or corruption, the Government may be the choice of a party for its own ends, not of the nation for the national good. — John Adams
To know how to produce a work of art is to know how to discard the extraneous. — Laura Esquivel
If, at the time when the mind is praying it is distracted by any extraneous thought or worry about anything, then this prayer is not called pure. — Isaac of Nineveh
Expected outcomes contribute to motivation independently of self-efficacy beliefs when outcomes are not completely controlled by quality of performance. This occurs when extraneous factors also affect outcomes, or outcomes are socially tied to a minimum level of performance so that some variations in quality of performance above and below the standard do not produce differential outcomes — Albert Bandura
As sculptors chip away the stone in order to find the statue, writers chip away extraneous verbiage so readers can see the shape of an idea clearly. My gift is to see through the confusion, to bring order and simplicity to a story. — Leslie Parrish
Kids, if anything, are harder to write for because they are a more discerning audience. They will not stay with you if you go off on a tangent or if you give them extraneous information that doesn't serve the story. You really have to tell a tight story. You have to give them humor and suspense and believable characters. All those things that adults want too, but you have to be really on your game when you're writing for kids. — Rick Riordan
Directing made me realise what I do as an actor that's extraneous, it focuses your mind on story, story, story. — Matt Smith
There is the name and the thing; the name is a sound which sets a mark on and denotes the thing. The name is no part of the thing nor of the substance; it is an extraneous piece added to the thing, and outside of it. — Michel de Montaigne
Twitter taught me how to become better at writing jokes because it forces you to chip away at all the extraneous words. — Peter Serafinowicz
Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me--a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life; not concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose, like all other books. — Michel de Montaigne
In Conclusion
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