Vol. 06 · Misquoted ·Speech ·76 of 348
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
They never said that.
What people say
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
What was actually said
"It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." Albert Einstein — Lecture, "On the Method of Theoretical Physics" (Herbert Spencer Lecture, Oxford, 10 June 1933)
Why it stuck
Einstein never said the short version. His actual formulation runs three dozen words. The compressed aphorism first appears in Composer magazine in 1962 (attributed to Roger Sessions paraphrasing Einstein).
Reader's Digest printed the short version in 1977, sealing the misattribution.
Know another line by heart?
Play the duel and see how many you can spot. Or browse the whole shelf.