Quotes About Complexity

As she watched him, Mrs. Gates was once again struck by the painful realization that there were Ã¢â'¬Â¦ things Ã¢â'¬Â¦ about her husband she would never understand. Gaps in his life she could never fill, leaps in his thinking she could not comprehend.

very size and structure of the department assured ponderousness, if not paralysis, because so many different organizations had to be involved in even the smallest decisions.

To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.

There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

A complex assembly is best described first in terms of its substances: its subassembles and parts. Then, next, it is described in terms of its methods: its functions as they occur in sequence.

I have seen these marshes a thousand times, yet each time they're new. It's wrong to call them benign. You could just as well call them cruel and senseless, they are all of those things, but the reality of them overwhelms halfway conceptions.

He is not stubborn, not narrow-minded, not lazy, not stupid. There was just no easy explanation. So it was left up in the air, a kind of mystery that one gives up on because there is no sense in just going round and round and round looking for an answer that's not there.

The entire description of the committee's work was a strange pattern of ordinary enough words put together in a most unordinary way, so that the explanation seemed far more complex than the thing he was trying to have explained.

The motorcycle is a system. A real system.

In a reductionist view, understanding something complex requires breaking it down into its components; understand those parts, add them together, and you'll understand the big picture. And in this reductionist world, to understand cells, organs, bodies, and behavior, the best constituent part to study is genes.

Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes.

If you have to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be it's complicated.

Ask not what a gene does. Ask what it does in a particular environment and when expressed in a particular network of other genes

In other words, the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment.

by the time you finish this book, you'll see that it actually makes no sense to distinguish between aspects of a behavior that are "biological" and those that would be described as, say, "psychological" or "cultural." Utterly intertwined.

Ooh, we're going to think subtly. We won't get suckered into simplistic answers, not like those chicken-crossing-the-road neurochemists and chicken evolutionary biologists and chicken psychoanalysts, all living in their own limited categorical buckets.

A vida adulta está cheia de encruzilhadas significativas nas quais fazer a coisa certa é sem dúvida mais complicado. Conduzir-se a contento por esse caminho faz parte do portfólio do córtex frontal, e desenvolver as habilidades necessárias para fazer isso de maneira correta requer um profundo aprimoramento por meio da experiência.

About forty per cent of all strokes are unexplained. They're a mystery, like life itself.

I knew I couldn't sleep with her. I don't know - in my small experience of women, I've found it to hard to sleep with them at such times. Times when you get impression that there's more to them than an opportunity. Sleeping with girls was great, sleeping with people was a bit more complicated. Maybe it was a bad thing, maybe a sign of my immaturity, but I knew that there was some kind of tenderness in it as well.

Complex and original people know that truth is rarely simple, almost never all of this or all of that, but elusive minglings and mixtures, evolving shapes, with tinctures of irony and paradox.

All the knowledge that has led our species from wearing animal skins to people flying, complete with proofs, would fill a handful of reference books, but a bookcase the size of the earth would not suffice to hold all the rest, quite apart from the vast discussions that are conducted not with the pen but with the sword and chains.

He felt himself, in a way, torn between two worlds: a solid, bourgeois world where ultimately everything was ordered and rational, as he was accustomed to from home, and an untrammelled one full of darkness, blood, and undreamt-of surprises.

Die Wahrheit ist eben kein Kristall, den man in die Tasche stecken kann, sondern eine unendliche Flüssigkeit, in die man hineinfällt.

Und es gibt auch Dinge, wo zwischen Erleben und Erfassen diese Unvergleichkeit herrscht. Immer aber ist es so, dass das, was wir in einem Augenblick ungeteilt und ohne Fragen erleben, unverständlich und verwirrt wird, wenn wir es mit den Ketten der Gedanken zu unserem bleibenden Besitze fesseln wollen. Und was groß und menscenfremd aussieht, solange unsere Worte von ferne danach langen, wird einfach und verliert das Beunruhigende, sobald es in den Tatkreis unseres Lebens eintritt.