Quotes About Complexity

WE LIVE IN A CULTURAL CLIMATE QUICK TO ACCEPT THE WORST, DENY the best. And we often have difficulty, unlike Dickens, in being sure about how to define moral indicators, especially in complicated human matters. To Dickens, that came easily. He unhesitatingly believed in absolute truths, both moral and cosmological, though, paradoxically, opposite absolutes often co-exist, as in "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Nada siempre es más sencillo que algo. Más triste también, pero más sencillo.

La poesía sirve sobre todo para complicar las cosas, ¿no? Pero igual complicándolas se entienden mejor. Y al entenderlas se simplifican.

Nothing human's not a broth of false and true.

I try not to stack the deck unduly but always let doubt and darkness have their say along with faith and hope, not just because it is good apologetics - woe to him who tries to make it look simple and easy - but because to do it any other way would be to be less true to the elements of doubt and darkness that exist in myself no less than in others.

people are complicated; you can't label 'em with a word.

Every Profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood

There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.

They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.

One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. Good is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a common good! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.

I obviously do everything to be hard to understand myself

One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions.

To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

Women are considered deep - why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.

Man is the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, and not one has strayed more dangerously from its instincts. But for all that, of course, he is the most interesting.

There are many kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx has eyes - and consequently there are many kinds of 'truths,' and consequently there is no truth

How much blood and horror is at the bottom of all 'good things'!

All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.

Sharp and mild, dull and keen, well known and strange, dirty and clean, where both the fool and wise are seen: All this am I, have ever been, - in me dove, snake and swine convene!

He wants to be known deep down, abysmally deep down, before he is capable of being loved at all; he dares to let himself be fathomed. He feels that his beloved is fully in his possession only when she no longer deceives herself about him, when she loves him just as much for his devilry and hidden insatiability as for his graciousness, patience, and spirituality.

Love brings the high and concealed characteristics of the lover into the light--what is rare and exceptional in him: to that extent it easily deceives regarding his normality.

The man who is to be great is the one who can be the most solitary, the most hidden, the most deviant, the man beyond good and evil, lord of his virtues, a man lavishly endowed with will - this is precisely what greatness is to be called: it is able to be as much a totality as something multi-faceted, as wide as it is full

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

Eu sou vários! Há multidões em mim. Na mesa de minha alma sentam-se muitos, e eu sou todos eles. Há um velho, uma criança, um sábio, um tolo. Você nunca saberá com quem está sentado ou quanto tempo permanecerá com cada um de mim. Mas prometo que, se nos sentarmos à mesa, nesse ritual sagrado eu lhe entregarei ao menos um dos tantos que sou, e correrei os riscos de estarmos juntos no mesmo plano.