Quotes About Complexity

I've been out with some extremely beautiful women who have had no sex appeal whatsoever. It really is a lot more than skin deep.

He loved me and he beat me. I loved him and I took it. It's as simple as that, and as stupid and complicated. It's terrible. It's like knowing someone you love is dead but not having the body to prove it. He loved me. I know it.

Schnitzler, me dije a mí mismo, tenía razón: «Una mujer te puede dejar por falta de amor, o por exceso de amor, por esto o por aquello, por todo o por nada».

Este oscuro corazón late al lado de la necesaria ironía sin la cual se apagaría la reflexión.

simplicity without oversimplification.

You can't make a renaissance person anymore, because the range of what you would need to do is just impossible. But you could actually assemble a renaissance team."7 The integrative thinkers rely on their "renaissance teams" to broaden salience, maintain sophisticated causality, and create a holistic architecture in their drive for creative resolution.

The Problem-Solving Power of Integrative Thinking The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.1 —F. Scott Fitzgerald

As Peter Bernstein has written, nature's pattern emerges only from the chaotic disorder of many random events.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.

If you come from mathematics, as I do, you realize that there are many problems, even classical problems, which cannot be solved by computation alone

There are completely deterministic universe models, with clear-cut rules of evolution, that are impossible to simulate computationally.

God is a giant quiltmaker. With an infinite variety of designs. And the quilt is grown so big and confusing, the pattern is impossible to see, the squares and diamonds and triangles don't fit well together anymore, it's all become meaningless. So He has abandoned it.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little.

The Text is not a definitive object.

As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).

Back when he was forced to ride herd over the Detroit Pistons and all their gnarly egos, coach Chuck Daly used to have a saying: The game is simple, but the people are complicated.

I have a tremendous fascination with the United States of America, the grand, swirling variousness of it, the way it siphons off the ambitious, the poor, and the abused from so many other nations, the ability we seem to have to be noble and heroic at the same time as we are being arrogant and stupid.

The frown again. So much contained there in the flex of a few muscles. All of history, it sometimes seemed to me. All of ours, at least.

Q. Life is not two sheets of paper, one black, one white. Life is a ream of paper, each page a different shade of gray." That was about as poetic as Boone had ever been. And I was still confused.

This is not to say that holding political beliefs is wrong—it's just that politics are naturally reductive, and the world is infinitely complex. Cling too fiercely to your ideologies and you'll miss the subtle realities that politics can't address. You'll also miss the chance to learn from people who don't share your worldview. If

rien n'est blanc ou noir et que le blanc, c'est souvent le noir qui se cache et le noir, c'est parfois le blanc qui s'est fait avoir.

Une idée était venue depuis longtemps se loger dans mon esprit dont j'ai eu beaucoup de mal à me débarrasser par la suite et peut-être ne m'en suis-je jamais débarrassé entièrement. Les nazis étaient humains. Et ce qu'il y avait d'humain en eux, c'était leur inhumanité.