"The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple." -- Stanley Gudder
@ColinTheMathmo This just immediately made me think of the von Neumann quotation, "If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is," which is slightly less comforting.
@ColinTheMathmo I find that I relate more to the von Neumann quotation in thinking about my own experience: as I learned physics it seemed at first like it would make understanding the world easy, but I distinctly remember then learning how, for example, almost everything is actually non-linear and realizing how complicated the world actually is.