Quotes About Complexity

Philosophical attention is focused on a more complex matter: the possession of wisdom (sophia – the wisdom loved by the philosophos). It is assumed, taken to be a matter beyond argument, that wisdom is not just knowing individual facts, but being able to relate them to one another in a unified and structured way, one that involves understanding of a field or area of knowledge.

No individual belongs to "just" one socially constructed category: each has his or her multiple racial, gender, class-based, national identities, and that's just a start of the list. Nor are these categories uniform or stable; we are Whitmanesque, we contain multitudes.

We can't be direct, so we end up saying the weirdest things.

It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.

What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any.

We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.

But Judas, now, sitting at the Last Supper trying to disguise his treachery, with that symbolic cat behind him, he was something else because of his human complexity.

It is one of Hawthorne's bosom serpents, rarely noticed because in the bosom it inhabits it can so easily camouflage itself among a crowd of the warmest and most generous sentiments.

He chose to include the thingsThat in each other are included, the whole,The complicate, the amassing harmony.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor's trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things

I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Do I contradict myself Very well then I contradict myself,

All the Congress, all the accountants and tax lawyers, all the judges, and a convention of wizards all cannot tell for sure what the income tax law says.

We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one side of the moon; in either case there is also a dark half, which is unknown to us. We all come down to dinner, but each has a room to himself.

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].

My life is not packaged, Not tidy. There are leftover strands and jagged Edges that cut even my friends.

When you write biographies, whether it's about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human.

you think the two of us have changed enough to make it interesting again?" Bitsy put her paw on the pavement. "Sometimes," she said, "I'm immensely grateful that I don't possess a limbic system.

Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening; the taste for the truth is an acquired taste that few acquire…. ….The world winks at dishonesty. the world does not call it dishonesty

No one system reveals the entire truth; at best, each organizes one point of view or perspective. We must consider many perspectives, and a philosopher should not imprison his thought in one system.

The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.

Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.