Quotes About Complexity

There are always exceptions to every generalization. [A Christian Epilogue]

If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation it would appear that God has a special fondness for stars and beetles.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

No poem is easily grasped so why should any reader expect fast results?

To have as its holy text a mixture of works of many genres Ã¢â'¬â€œ predominantly narratives, aphorisms, poems and letters Ã¢â'¬â€œ introduces great complexity into Christianity.

Such simple questions as How many feet are in a mile? or What's the number of square feet in an acre? produce the not-so-simple answers of 5,280 and 43,560.

A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory.

? m?s? gyvenim? ?eina tiek kit? gyvenim?, kad j? nesuskai?iuosi.

Never again will a single story be told as though it"s the only one.

Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.

Part of what makes a theory elegant is its power to explain much while assuming little.

Just as you can't attribute the spin of a proton to any one of its constituents, you can't attribute an event in time to a single earlier cause. Complex systems have neither a useful notion of individuality nor a proper notion of causality.

Human beings are impossibly complex tarballs of muscle, blood, bone, breath, and electrical pulses that travel through nerves and neurons; we are bundles of electrical pulses carrying payloads, pings hitting servers. And our identities are inextricably connected to our environments: No story can be told without a setting.

human responses aren't additive in the same way that objects are additive. Whereas four lightbulbs illuminate a room more effectively than three lightbulbs, and three loudspeakers fill a room with noise more effectively than two loudspeakers, two people are often less effective than a single person.

If a system is to deal successfully with the diversity of challenges its environment produces, then it needs to have a repertoire of responses (at least) as nuanced as the problems thrown up by the environment. So a viable system is one that can handle the variability of its environment. Or, as Ashby put it, only variety can absorb variety.

Description length is actually a measure of complexity

Choice is simply a fanciful shorthand for biological processes we do not yet apprehend.

I love each and every one of you but, like my own family, you thrill, you frustrate, you anger.

Some things are of that nature as to make One's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache.

The Creator, if He exists, has a special preference for beetles.

But after all the horse trading between Democrats and Republicans—and reformers, bankers, and lobbyists—I fear that its complex, obtuse regulations (some 170 separate rules are still being developed) involved in limiting proprietary trading by banks makes me wish we'd taken the simple step of restoring the separation of deposit taking banks from investment banks. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 worked well until it was gradually eroded and finally repealed in 1999.

In my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero. —The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, no. 183

The reason we life black people isn't because they're black. We like them because they're not as grey as we are.