Quotes About Complexity

Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication. -Aunt Beast

Nothing important is completely explicable.

I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything.

With our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations.

When I start a new seminar I tell my students that I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things.

Do you think things always have an explanation?" "Yes. I believe that they do. But I think that with our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations. But you see, Meg, just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

we're all a grab bag of good and eveil, and by and large can't tell which is which

Well, the fifth dimension's a tesseract.

We human creatures can make watches and clocks and sensitive timing devices, but we don't understand what we're timing.

The complete, the true Mrs Whatsit, Meg realized, was beyond human understanding. What she saw was only the game Mrs Whatsit was playing; it was an amusing and charming game, a game full of both laughter and comfort, but it was only the tiniest facet of all the things Mrs Whatsit could be.

But an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol. I don't want that kind of God.

one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be.

See? So is 0.428571.

It seemed strange that with so much softness in her actual construction Mamma gave such a feeling of hardness. When

But sometimes,' he said, forcing himself to speak, 'sometimes just loving each other isn't enough.

That you had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she'd ever met.

He was not a simple man and, consequently, a simple happiness was not in his nature, she concluded, but I did know him to have moments of simple pleasure and obvious joy.

You have a faculty for defining the simplest in terms of the grandiose, so that a poor devil like me can't understand it.

Maybe one reason so many people have so many problems is that there are so many other people with so many solutions. (Love on a Gunboat)

With my sort of book there's no resolution, because there's no solution. The problems aren't answered in the end because there is no answer. They're problems that are handed on to the reader, not solved for him so that he can go away thinking he lives in a beautiful world. It's not a beautiful world.

When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.

We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.

as human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.

Affect, Imagery, Consciousness , a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant.