Quotes About Complexity

we do not admire what we cannot understand.

Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.

You think you know someone by looking at his face but what can one face say about the thousand thoughts behind those eyes.

The convention that there were two sides to every story eliminated the third and fourth and fifth sides. Even dividing the past two and a half million years into the "Neolithic" (the new stone age) and the "Paleolithic" (the old stone age) was reductionist. "Write this down," he said. "Dichotomies are for idiots.

everybody has a light and a dark side, and neither can exist without the other.

I fall in love with everything I also hate everything. It's very hard to be a misanthrope and a romantic.

But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it.

The minute that you start thinking about someone in the whole circumstance of his life to the extent that you can, he becomes mysterious, immediately.

I'm a simple man who was brought up by a complicated man. So I have mannerisms and so on. Vocabulary. People can be misled.

Clothed as he was in the garments of misfeasance and bewilderment, there lived in him a deeply arrogant man.

If different systems don't merge in a comprehensible way, that's a flaw in our comprehension and not a flaw in one system or the other.

It is the elegance of nature that creates even the appearance of simplicity... It is not respectable to say that an organism is designed to be both stable as an entity and mutable in response to environment, though it must be said that this complex equilibrium is amazing and beautiful and everywhere repeated in a wealth of variations that can seem like virtuosity regaling itself with its own brilliance.

Well, you know, that's good of you to say, but it's not always wise to make promises. There can be a lot more involved in keeping them than it seems at the time.

Ideology is a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe.

Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple, that complexity reigns and must be accepted.

As we shall see throughout this book, the unifying powers of group theory are so colossal that historian of mathematics Eric Temple Bell (1883-1960) once commented, When ever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.

La verdad, había en ella algo que era imposible no admirar, por esas razones que nos llevan a apreciar las obras bien hechas, aunque sean perversas.

Es verdad que es imposible conocer a fondo a las personas, todas son insondables.

The simple fact is that he didn't write what he saw but what he felt and believed, what those all around him felt and believed. That's how that whole tangled web of false stories and humbug got woven, becoming so intricate that there is now no way to disentangle it.

Each one of us is, successively, not one but many. And these successive personalities that emerge one from the other tend to present the strangest, most astonishing contrasts among themselves. —José Enrique Rodó, Motives of Proteus

Por más que uno fuera precavido y planeara sus acciones con la mayor lucidez, la vida, más compleja que todos los cálculos, hacía estallar los esquemas y los reemplazaba por situaciones inciertas y contradictorias.

There were so many problems; the hydra had so many heads, iniquity raised its head everywhere one looked.

Una vez más se dijo que su vida había sido una contradicción permanente, una sucesión de confusiones y enredos truculentos, donde la verdad de sus intenciones y comportamientos quedaba siempre, por obra del azar o de su propia torpeza, oscurecida, distorsionada, trastocada en mentira