Quotes About Complexity

We never know what horrific and powerful currents run beneath the seemingly calm surface of another's life.

Pär grinned. "What's so funny?" "You are, Bartolomeo." "Everything you've said is true," Nikos added, "but it's not that simple. Your choices, your decisions, were not necessarily the wrong choices. Sometimes, they were the right choices, the moral choices. They just didn't work out." "That's an understatement." "I'm

There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.

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.

We seem to have this tendency to want to make things simple with formulas-and yet our formulas consistently make them more complex.

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.

What can you know about a person? They shift in the light. You can't light up all sides at once. Add a second light and you get a second darkness, it's only fair.

What can you know about a person? They shift in the light. You can't light up all sides at once.

Do you want it? Do you want anything I have? Will you throw me to the ground like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle it out with your bare hands? If you love me, Henry, you don't love me in a way I understand.

You want it to mean something. Sad pink cakes. Five strange blue things. You want to have it glued together.

What can you know about a person? They shift in the light. You can't light up all sides at once. Add a second light and you get a second darkness, it's only fair. He is looking at the wall and I am looking at his looking. Difficult thing, to be scrutinized so long. I find parts that overlap with mine and light them up in clays and creams, yellow music singing pink, the flicker of his mouth a purple rust.

there's no pure way to say it.

Explaining will get us nowhere.

Nonetheless, that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields—from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.9

To put this more concretely, we argue that professional work should be decomposed, that is, broken down into its constituent 'tasks'—

Industry and commerce are becoming increasingly complex, which means that there are more calls for professional help from lawyers, consultants, accountants, tax advisers, amongst others.

Sometimes the simplest and most obvious distinctions give rise to the profoundest intellectual difficulties, and things most commonplace in our daily experience drive home to us the depths of our ignorance

We trigger each other, it seems, some dysfunctional Rube Goldberg mousetrap, a laugh, then a slap, a razor gliding over a mirror, a glass filled, a glass emptied, a ball rolling down a length of pipe, a pipe filling up and overflowing with smoke. On our best days, we see each other for all that we are, and we find a way to make each other better.

People are often ready to accept a false dilemma because few feel comfortable with complexity and nuanced distinctions. They like sweeping absolutes. They want clear and simple choices. So, those skilled in manipulating people, face them with false dilemmas (one alternative of which is the one the manipulator wants them to choose, the other alternative clearly unacceptable). They present arguments in black or white form.

We are not merely the most intelligent of animals. We also have a rare and perplexing combination of moral tendencies. We can be the nastiest of species and also the nicest.

Yes, but still, if it was as adult and sophisticated as all that, why couldn't she decide what to do with her sweater? Why was she having such an awful time thinking of what in the world she could possibly say to the man?

Wow." I hadn't thought Dimitri could be any cooler, but I was wrong. "You beat up your dad. I mean, that's really horrible...what happened. But, wow. You really are a god." He blinked. "What?" "Uh, nothing.

He was too perfect, despite being one of the most imperfect people I knew.

Did you know that it's a lot harder to put organs back in the body than it is to get them out?