Quotes About Complexity

Gauß kam auf den Zufall zu sprechen, den Feind allen Wissens, den er immer habe besiegen wollen. Aus der Nähe betrachtet, sehe man hinter jedem Ereignis die unendliche Feinheit des Kausalgewebes. Trete man weit genug zurück, offenbarten sich die großen Muster. Freiheit und Zufall seien eine Frage der mittleren Entfernung, eine Sache des Abstands...

Stories within stories within stories. You never know where one ends and another begins! In truth, they all flow into one another. It's only in books that they're clearly divided.

Loving everyone," said Jimmy, "is almost the same thing as loving nobody." He paused. "You're awfully hard on the people who love you.

Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it's about experience, it's about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious.

Our parents are mysterious to us in ways that we can never quite be mysteries to them.

real tragedy is never a straightforward confrontation between Good and Evil, but is, rather, much more exquisitely and much more agonizingly, a conflict between two irreconcilable views of the world.

Plus il m´est donné de me pencher sur les difficultés d´un grand nombre de personnes, plus il m´apparaît clairement que chacun de nous est comparable à une gigantesque bibliothèque. Chaque chapitre d´un seul de ses livres serait alors semblable à une vie entière tandis que chacune des pages du chapitre en question comprendrait des post-scriptum renvoyant à d´autres chapitres, à d´autres livres, à l´infini.

The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership (2005). He advises that a leader "needs to be able to see the shades of gray inherent in a situation in order to make wise decisions as to how to proceed" (p. 7). He encourages leaders to examine all arguments without forming an opinion, using an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote for support: "The test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time while still retaining the ability to function

Statisticamente tutto si spiega, personalmente tutto si complica.

Our reasons for reading what we do are as eccentric as our reasons for living as we do.

Reading something challenging feels like biting into a thick cake or having a rich coffee.

Trust me, there is no formula for most things that are not math.

Religion leaves no room for human complexity.

I've always found it best to avoid the truth. It invariably leads to unnecessary complications. - Gabriel Allon

I've always found it best to avoid the truth. It invariably leads to unnecessary complications.

But it was also a face of many layers. Sensuous and vulnerable, contemptuous and iron-willed. Somewhere a trace of sadness. But it was her energy—her restless, reckless energy—that intrigued him the most and would have been most difficult to capture on canvas. Her eyes flashed about him. Even after the long rehearsal session, her hands could not remain quiet. They

To Pakistan? Or Afghanistan? Or Wherever-the-fuck-istan?

Why learn a number like pi to so many decimal places? The answer I gave then as I do now is that pi is for me an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing. Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.

What would it be like, a world without snow? I cannot imagine such a place. It would be like a world devoid of numbers. Every snowflake, unique as every number, tells us something about complexity. Perhaps that is why we will never tire of its wonder.

Change appears to us mysterious because it is invisible. It is impossible to see a tree grow tall or a man grow old, except with the precarious imagination of hindsight. A tree is small, and later it is tall. A man is young, and later he is old. A people are at peace, and later they are at war. In each case, the intermediate states are at once infinitely many and infinitely complex, which is why they exceed our finite perceptions.

If the goal of science is to make us feel awkward and ignorant in the presence of things we once understood perfectly well, then psychology has succeeded above all others.

But" is a three-letter stroke of genius. It keeps things in perspective. It prevents me from turning too rigid and self-righteous. It reminds me that hardly anything in life is black or white.

Tasting scotch was an intense experience; it didn't have the lovely layering of wines