Quotes About Complexity

El individuo medio es capaz de afrontar una narrativa compleja, pero a menudo no es lo que se le ofrece. En la cultura popular, primero, se decide que el público está compuesto sobre todo de simplones que no apreciarían nada inteligente. Entonces, se producen obras de ese estilo, asumiendo que es lo que la masa quiere. Este proceso, prolongado durante décadas, genera una audiencia que difícilmente podrá reconocer un material inteligente, si es que lo ve.

There are many sides to this difficult problem. And people persist in discussing soil-erosion, and tribal decay, and lack of schools, and crime, as though they were all parts of the matter. If you think long enough about it, you will be brought to consider republics, and bilingualism, and immigration, and Palestine, and God knows what. So in a way it is best not to think about it at all.

Child, you know nothing about war. You think it's big and it's loud and it's good versus evil. It's not. War is a delicate thing: it requires precision. It requires timing.

Let's never forget that whatever brilliant ideas you have or hear, that the opposite may also be true.

Each of us is leading a difficult life, and when we meet people we are seeing only a tiny part of the thinnest veneer of their complex, troubled existences. To practise anything other than kindness towards them, to treat them in any way save generously, is to quietly deny their humanity.

To grow up is to endure the equivocal, to permit the ambiguous.

The sign of the true expert is his modest awareness of how much more there is to know; how complex and nuanced the subject at hand insists on remaining.

It's a rule in life that the more certain we appear about something, the less we know about it. It has a name – the Dunning–Kruger effect – and it is at work every time someone tells you with absolute certainty how things are in the world. The sign of the true expert is his modest awareness of how much more there is to know; how complex and nuanced the subject at hand insists on remaining.

If three hundred years of chainsaws, CFCs, depleted uranium, automobiles, genetic engineering, airplanes, routine international trade, computers, plastics, endocrine disruptors, pesticides, vivisection, internal combustion engines, feller bunchers, dragline excavators, televisions, cell phones, and nuclear (and conventional) bombs are not enough to convey the picture, then that picture will never be conveyed.

Human affairs are so obscure and various that nothing can be clearly known.

what is apparently a good deed need not really be a good deed, for every moment is governed by factors that are often beyond human comprehension.

The epic constantly reminds us that what is apparently a good deed need not really be a good deed, for every moment is governed by factors that are often beyond human comprehension.

Even the worst of villains has a story that perhaps explains their actions, without condoning them.

They brought home to me the central reason why books have meant so much to me. It is not because of my pleasure in the art of writing, though that has been very great. It is because they have taken me so far beyond the narrow limits of my own experience and have so greatly enlarged my sense of the complexity of life: of its consuming darkness, and also – thank God – of the light which continues to struggle through.

She was nothing like me; she was everything like me. How was that even possible?

For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at different times. How can one choose?

You're trying to paint things as either black or white," he said. "As either good or evil. It's never that neat.

It'd be a poor kind of world where there was just one explanation for things. ---Rhiow

This living stuff is a lot. Too much, and not enough. Half empty, and half full.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

I have to put the worst of her into her.

There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.

Logic doesn't stop you feeling. You can behave logically and it can hurt like hell. Or it can comfort you. Or release you. Or all at the same time

la familia real y la familia biológica, sin siquiera hablar de la familia política, coinciden con menos frecuencia de la que se cree, y las familias "ensambladas" no esperaron la década de 1990 para existir).