Quotes About Complexity

The tapestry of history has no point at which you can cut it and leave the design intelligible.

When you wear so many hats in society, you never know who you are. That's the beauty of it. Because once you find out who you are, you're screwed.

People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under rational human control.

Dostoevsky was the first to reveal to us this teeming multiplicity of emotions, this complexity of our spiritual universe.

Vivir en una ciudad es, notoriamente, una experiencia ambivalente. Atrae y repele, pero para complicar aún más la situación del habitante de la ciudad, son los mismos aspectos de la vida urbana, intermitentemente o de manera simultánea, los que atraen y repelen." Zygmunt Bauman / Amor líquido

El ménàge à quatre (o six, huit, etc., cuantos más sean mejor) está a salvo de todas las pestes y deficiencias que, como sabemos, son la ruina del ménage à trois.

A vida urbana é intrínseca e irremediavelmente ambivalente.

las ciudades se han convertido en el basurero de los problemas engendrados globalmente.

La posibilidad de contener y asimilar la imparable masa de innovaciones es cada vez menos promisoria, por no decir inalcanzable.

Reality is like a fruitcake; pretty enough to look at but with all sorts of nasty things lurking just beneath the surface.

I believe it was the great ogre philosopher Gary who observed that complexity is, generally speaking, an illusion of conscious desire. All things exist in as simple a form as necessity dictates. When a thing is labeled 'complex,' that's just a roundabout way of saying you're not observant enough to understand it.

Because life is complicated and difficult. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't truly lived.

It makes for a complicated relationship, but what's life without a few well-chosen complications? Dull, that's what.

intellections have a use, don't think they don't: if the vine couldn't find a natural tree, what would become of it? if structure without life is meaningless, so is life without structure: we're going to make a dense, tangled trellis so lovely & complicated that every kind of variety will find a place in it or on it: you just be surprised: & forgive us: who mean song direct & fierce:

a saint with the heart of a devil, or a fiend with the soul of a saint.

Nearly anything that can be said about Hinduism can be contradicted by something else that is equally true about it, and nothing whatever that is said about it can be entirely true or entirely false

Modern man fell into the trap of believing that everything can be explained, that reality is a simple affair which has only to be organized in order to be mastered.

The human mind is one-sided. It can never grasp all of reality at once. When we look at things we see either the features which they have in common or the features that distinguish each of them.

How this is possible is, first, by being, literally, several in a single body. "We are twelve in my body. We are packed like sardines." In other words, the being that I am exists each time in several modes—or, let us say, several beings, which, although sometimes mutually exclusive, are nevertheless inside one another.

People want electrons to orbit atoms like tiny planets, hard and regular. They make sense that way. People like that....they don't want their electrons to exist only as a cloud of potentialities. But that's what we've got now, and we're stuck with it. Quantum mechanics isn't going to roll over and die as easily as God did.

Its first postulate is that the contemporary urban environment is so complex and so vexatious in its demands that no group of ordinary, unaided human beings can hope to understand it, let alone manage it wisely.

They were just people. They were too smart and too stupid to be anything else.

none of the ways in which we talk about race today stands up to the scrutiny that genetics has enabled. Families are too untidy, human history is too convoluted, people too motile. The deck has been shuffled and reshuffled. Genetics has shown that people are different, and these differences cluster according to geography and culture, but never in a way that aligns with the traditional concepts of human races.

We sometimes forget that though the data should be pure and straightforward, science is done by people, who are never either.