Quotes About Complexity

What we do as a society is seek simple answers.

We don't have a unitary society anymore, you know; it's very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house.

There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find the hive.

Despite all our amazing ability, ingenuity, technology and industry humans are the one species who have not mastered the art of simplicity.

Society my dear is like salt water good to swim in but hard to swallow.

Misery is complexity. Happiness is simplicity.

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

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum.

you can't really separate modernity from history or spiritual concerns from mundane ones. Everything feeds into everything else.

Like everything else in life, these questions have no easy answers.

Every moral teacher or spiritual adviser gives injunctions about how to live wisely and well. But life is so complicated and full of uncertainty that rules seldom tell us quite what to do.

Statistics are like bikinis-they show a lot but not everything.

Keep it simple, when you get too complex you forget the obvious.

It is very hard to be a female leader. While it is assumed that any man, no matter how tough, has a soft side... and female leader is assumed to be one-dimensional.

To the people out there, baseball is a simple sport. But it is complex. It is never easy.

The relativists' stance is extremely condescending: it treats a complex society as a monolith, obscures the conflicts within it, and takes its most obscurantist factions as spokespeople for the whole.

One could continue quoting Irigaray, but the reader is probably lost (so are we).

It is not possible to produce a set of rules purporting to describe what a man should do in every conceivable set of circumstances.

Ritardo ce ne sarà per forza, a causa di intoppi praticamente inevitabili, perché fino a un certo punto è meglio lasciare che ci siano intoppi piuttosto che spendere tempo sul progetto per essere sicuri che non ce ne siano (chissà quanti anni occorrerebbero per questa strada).

Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.

The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.