Quotes About Complexity

We're none of us hard as we seem.

Folk aren't just cowards or heroes. They're both and neither, depending on how things stand. Depending on who stands with them, who stands against. Depending on the life they've had. The death they see waiting. They

At first my father didn't like Art, but after he got to know him better he really hated him.

Why am I not good at anything?" "You're a good dad." "It ain't rocket science." No, Vic thought. It was harder.

fucking Judas Coyne on the boom box, a guy whose idea of musical complexity is a song with four power chords instead of three.

There's always a little decency in the worst places.... and always little secret selfishness in the best.

Golfers, even the best golfers, tend to think simple thoughts. It is a misconception many of us have about successful people, in all fields, from the best writers to surgeons to physicists, that they are lost in complications, pondering thoughts that would stagger our minds. At times, that's probably true, but much of what successful people think about is relentlessly simple, building blocks that lead to the complex things.

Hap, even tough I'm a racist castrating bitch that wants you to be better than you are, wants you to do something with your life besides be a knockabout, do you think you could find it in your heart, in your itty-bitty white man's dick, to get a hard-on for me? In other words, want to fuck?

We took what came the way it came. Least it was that way on the surface. You scratched us a little, though, you could find some jelly there pretty quick. We were the kind that found it hard to cry, but once we got started you best be ready for high water and the loading of animals two by two.

Human beings are like the screwed-up children of alcoholic parents in that way, picking up the pieces afterward and trying to make up reasons why. You could argue that's what makes us interesting, and maybe it is to some alien race studying us from a million miles away. From where I sit it just seems pathetic and sad.

The truth is more complicated than that,"she said, "not as neat.

I've never really understood that. It's a funny thing people sometimes accuse us of condescending to our characters somehow-that to me is kind of inexplicable.

People aren't tidy creations to be stacked neatly in the Tupperware or poured in premeasured quantities from a box into the Cuisinart with no spills; everybody alive is a lost and disastrous mess.

When thinking about risk, rather than making things unnecessarily complicated, there are really two main things you should want to know about an investment strategy: 1. What is the risk of losing money following that strategy over the long term? 2. What is the risk that your chosen strategy will perform worse than alternative strategies over the long term?

information in His Bible that is impossible to understand.

Croma staff officers, it seemed, liked to make things unnecessarily complicated just as human ones did.

The problem with looking at so much history from such a distance is that everything gets so crowded. Things are complicated in every period — you step back too far to get a generalised picture and you lose all the important, deciding details. Zoom in too far to get the detail and you'll get lost in complexity and never find your way out.

She'd come to find civil administration more interesting than war. It's certainly more complicated.

If you can't understand the spec for a new technology, don't worry: nobody else will understand it either, and the technology won't be that important.

In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters.

They wanted easy answers to complex fears.

the medium of the book tells us several things. Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page. Thirdly, it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.

one of my biggest learnings as a designer or technologist is—making something easy to use doesn't mean it's good for humanity.

the faster you make them go, the less they will understand. More speed means less comprehension. ...This showed there's just a maximum limit for how quickly humans can absorb information, and trying to bust through that barrier simply busts your brain's ability to understand it instead. The scientists investigating this also discovered that if you make people read quickly, they are much less likely to grapple with complex or challenging material. They start to prefer simplistic statements.