Quotes About Complexity

complicated women— fearful at heart but evil in deed.

Justice was its own art, shining light into the shadows, complex yet ultimately as simple as can be: bringing balance, making things right.

Si seulement il avait un peu de temps. [...] Le temps aussi de bien comprendre le mot amour. Un mot beaucoup trop gros pour lui. Tellement gros qu'il ne sait pas par quel bout le prendre.

Life is not like the game of chess. There are not only black and white pieces. There are gray figures, solitary knights, and equivocal characters who never get caught.

She wanted him to be the sunshine to her clouds. She couldn't handle the idea that he had weather patterns of his own, and that he contained within himself the makings of a downpour and possibly even a monsoon.

Language supplies us with ways to express ever subtler levels of meaning, but does that imply language gives meaning, or robs us of it when we are at a loss to name things?

There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but them it wouldn't be half so interesting.

Next time you write about a hero, put a little spice of human nature in him.

There's such a lot of different Annes in me. … If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.

There is a truth in Schopenhauer's view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say 'Let's get a rough idea', for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.

It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves

The fact that we cannot write down all the digits of pi is not a human shortcoming, as mathematicians sometimes think.

The atmosphere surrounding this problem is terrible. Dense clouds of language lie about the crucial point. It is almost impossible to get through to it.

Commenting on his Tractatus...It consists of two parts: the one written here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely the 2nd part that is the important one.

The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.

But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn't know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.

Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves.

What we can't say we can't say, and we can't whistle it either.

Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.

Unsere Zivilisation ist durch das Wort Fortschritt charakterisiert. Der Fortschritt ist ihre Form nicht eine ihrer Eigenschaften daß sie fortschrietet. Sie ist typisch aufbauend. Ihre Tätigkeit ist es ein immer komplizierteres Gebilde zu konstruieren. Und auch die Klarheit dient doch nur wieder diesem Zweck und ist nicht Selbstzweck. Mir dagegen ist die Klarheit, die Durchsichtigkeit, Selbstzweck.

The older I grow, the more I realize how terribly difficult it is for people to understand each other, and I think that what misleads one is the fact that they all look so much like each other. If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish, one wouldn't expect them to understand each other and things would look much more like what they really are.

Dalle vette nuvolose delle sue astrazioni il signor Anselmo lasciava spesso precipitar così, come valanghe, i suoi pensieri. La ragione, il nesso, l'opportunità di essi rimanevano lassù, tra le nuvole, dimodochè difficilmente a chi lo ascoltava riusciva di capirci qualche cosa.