Quotes About Complexity

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

No single man can be taken as a model for a perfect figure, for no man lives on earth who is endowed with the whole of beauty.

The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved.

The detailed geometry of the coenzyme molecule as a whole is fascinating in its complexity.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

Technological change is never an isolated phenomenon. This revolution takes place inside a complex ecosystem which comprises business, governmental and societal dimensions. To make a country fit for the new type of innovation-driven competition, the whole ecosystem has to be considered.

What I appreciate about Radiohead's work - and it's most evident in 'Hail to the Thief' - is how the juxtaposition of narratives on the band's albums somehow creates a sense of wholeness.

I think there are many faces to everyone. I also have my bad sides. Also I think everyone is trying to improve their shortcomings to become more wholesome.

I think for people who are inside these relationships that are really hard to leave, there is always a compelling reason to stay. It's not that they are wholly bad people.

There is a strange kind of human being in whom there is an eternal struggle between body and soul, animal and god, for dominance. In all great men this mixture is striking, and in none more so than in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

It is almost a rule that the more complex a man is, the simpler his billing. A person with a retrospective ability gone rampant often would be called an historian. Similarly, one to whom reality doesn't seem to make sense gets dubbed a philosopher.

For me, there is a stigma attached to playing beautiful parts. They are often empty characters whom the action happens around. I'm more drawn to characters with a complex internal life, who have a burning frustration underneath that keeps them going.

Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.

If you think about Shakespeare, you remember Richard III and Macbeth before you remember Ferdinand, whose role is just to fall in love and be a bit of a wimp. I love the baddies. More important, though, is making the baddies somehow, weirdly, understood.

Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend.

I always knew I was brainy. It struck me when I was a child that I wanted to be an adult because I never felt I belonged among children whose minds were so much simpler than mine.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

I personally feel that no human is a hero or a villain. All of us have our grey sides, and that is why grey interests me: because it's more human, more life-like.

It's hard to find logic in things sometimes. That's why I can't analyze things too much, because it often doesn't make much sense.

I think that Apple has revolutionized every other consumer industry; why not television? The complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated. So it seems exactly the sort of problem that if anyone is going to change the experience of what the first principles are, it is going to be Apple.

It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep.

A lot of times, when mother-son or mother-daughter relationships have been put on screen, they tend to trickle towards ugly, and I don't find that totally realistic for the wide swath of us, and it's also not that fun to watch.

The idea of the mulatto has been a gathering point for a wide variety of racial prejudices, fears, myths, and speculations.

We know that the ability to take on complex ideas, to handle the notion of a multiplicity of viewpoints, to deal in abstract thought relies on a person's experience of reading widely and often - in combination with open-ended but challenging discussion.