Quotes About Complexity

A man?s mind is never all of one thing, nor does he know himself or all his reasons beneath the masks he wears. They deceive even the wearer.

Straight answers were beyond the powers of Rashid Khalifa, who would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available.

They are the Eggheads. He is the Walrus.

This is what I am not: I am not one thing. I contain multitudes.

Anybody who's spent any time with machines at all,' he added, 'and baby, that's us all, knows first and foremost there's only one thing certain about them, computer or bicycle. They go wrong.

Volubility came easily to Max Ophuls, but it was just one of his many techniques of concealment, and he was never more hidden than when he seemed most open. For

No shortage of explanations for life's mysteries. Explanations are two a penny these days. The truth, however, is altogether harder to find

I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well.

I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that.

Politics, children: at the best of times a bad dirty business. We should have avoided it, I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity. But too late. Can't be helped. What can't be cured must be endured.

Anybody ever tries to tell you how this most beautiful and most evil of planets is somehow homogeneous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that it all adds up, you get on the phone to the straitjacket tailor.

that the truth often lies below the surface, and a man may be a great deal more than his most easily caricatured characteristics

The motivations of desire are obscure even to the desirous, the desiring and the desired.

to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

description of the world contains facts, certainly, and facts, as we've seen, are fluttery, elusive creatures, but there are armies of fact lepidopterists chasing after them, and sometimes they do get nailed to the wall, like moths.

Our interests in life are not always served by viewing people and things as collections of atoms—but this doesn't negate the truth or utility of physics.

I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.

Life is as complex as we are. Sometimes our vulnerability is our strength, our fear develops our courage, and our woundedness is the road to our integrity. It is not an either/or world.

The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.

I think when we use 'stress', we are often using a kind of dummy word to try to fit many different things into one big category.

Computer system analysis is like child-rearing; you can do grievous damage, but you cannot ensure success.

When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful.

The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements, as well as one's deepest failures is a definite symptom of maturity.