Quotes About Complexity

once you enumerate them all, once you sample seven billion examples from each of seven billion humans and fit them together in their trillion trillion contexts, all things begin to come clear.

In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple. This emerging virus was ike a bat crossing the sky at evening. Just when you thought you saw it flicker through your field of view, it was gone.

virus. In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath.

Globalisation creates a world where causes are remote form effects, and the connections between them are often hidden or obscure.

The idea that foods and diets will "just mix" when they come into contact is clearly a vast oversimplification.

the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.

But if anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows that he has not understood the first thing about them. - Niels Bohr

Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution.

The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young. —JAMES HOLLIS, FINDING MEANING IN THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE

All theologies are blasphemous in so far as they attempt to reduce God to something that can be known through the understanding by which we know other things.

Mystery is not something that you cannot understand, but it is something that is endlessly understandable! It is multilayered and pregnant with meaning and never totally admits to closure or resolution.

This new coherence, a unified field inclusive of the paradoxes, is precisely what gradually characterizes a second-half-of-life person. It feels like a return to simplicity after having learned from all the complexity. Finally, at last, one has lived long enough to see that "everything belongs,"4 even the sad, absurd, and futile parts.

We need to hold together all of the stages of life, and for some strange, wonderful reason, it all becomes quite "simple" as we approach our later years.

The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young. —JAMES HOLLIS

Life moves first toward diversity and then toward union of that very diversity at ever higher levels. It is the old philosophical problem of "the one and the many

Because yank out one thread from the fabric of human destiny, and everything unravels. Though it could also be said that things have a tendency to unravel regardless.

wasn't in fact possible to strip life of its clutter for the simple reason that life was clutter.

She had always seemed to him to be deep-down wild, the wilder because she harnessed that wildness most of the time.

I write about it not because I understand it, but because I don't.

Laughter is often a more complex and thoughtful emotional response than tears, though we seem to believe that being moved to tears is somehow more noble

If you love me, Henry, you don't love me in a way I understand.

Everyone has one system they use and one they are building, but most do not see the bigger picture of the system they are in.

there are always more than two sides to a story, that nobody is ever as bad as people think, and nobody is ever as good as people think.

There were just enough flaws to make her perfect.