Quotes About Complexity

You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.

You know, you're a little complicated after all." "Oh no," she assured him hastily. "No, I'm not really - I'm just a - I'm just a whole lot of different simple people.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

I think most people are confused about life, because it's not just one thing going on," said Elner. "It's many things going on at the same time. Life is both sad and happy, simple and complex, all at the same time.

You think people are some kind of pure, white feathered birds flying in the clouds. They're not. They're pigs and they love to wallow in the mud and dirt.

It turns out that in any system, of these three characteristics—open, fast, stable—you can have only two.

But looking under the covers of Indian democracy one sees a more complex and troubling reality. In recent decades, India has become something quite different from the picture in the hearts of its admirers. Not that it is less democratic: in important ways it has become more democratic. But it has become less tolerant, less secular, less law-abiding, less liberal. And these two trends—democratization and illiberalism—are directly related.

If human beings could communicate in mathematical language -- which is more poetical than any other language -- the world would be an easier place to live. Perhaps one day we will follow Nature's example, for her immense book is written in mathematical language, as Galileo has affirmed.

But I am not perfect in my way of putting things Because I lack the divine simplicity Of being only what I appear to be.

I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.

Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!

Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.

Each of us is several, is many,is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. Livro Do Desassossego

To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we've understood it.

Toda a compreensão é imperfeita porque, quanto mais se expande, em maiores fronteiras confina com o incompreensível que a cerca.

Anyone who wants to be understood will never know the delight of being understood, because this happens only to the complex and misunderstood; simple souls, the ones whom other people can understand, never feel a desire to be understood.

This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells - better yet, he's a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in minature. [58, Zenith trans.]

Each us is more than one person, many people, a proliferation of our one self. That's why the same person who scorns his surroundings is different from the person who is gladdened or made to suffer by them. In the vast colony of our being there are many different kinds of people, all thinking and feeling differently.

Other people's understanding of us is made up of so many complex misunderstandings.

Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. (Text 396)

The human soul is a madhouse of the grotesque.

Sou daquelas almas que as mulheres dizem que amam, e nunca reconhecem quando encontram

A concisão é a luxúria do pensamento.

El gozo de ser comprendido no puede disfrutarlo quien quiere ser comprendido, porque eso sólo les sucede a los complejos y a los incomprendidos; y los demás, los sencillos, los que pueden ser comprendidos por los demás, ésos nunca sienten el deseo de ser comprendidos.