Quotes About Complexity

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

I had the sudden insight that nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, "That afternoon when I met so-and-so . . . was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon.

Because I'd lived through adversity once before, what I learned about myself was like a reminder of something I'd once known but had nearly forgotten-namely, that beneath the elegant clothing, and the accomplished dancing, and the clever conversation, my life had no complexity at all, but was as simple as a stone falling toward the ground. My whole purpose in everything during the past ten years had been to win the affections of the Chairman.

I would've had an easier time if my emotions had all pulled me in the same direction, but it wasn't so simple. I'd been blown about like a scrap of paper in the wind.

Tuve la súbita intuición de que nada en la vida es tan simple como imaginamos.

I couldn't help but let out a great sigh when I heard this; and I call it a great sigh because it contained many smaller sighs within it - one sigh of disappointment, one of frustration, one of sadness. . . and I don't know what else

We are a strange people, Howden thought: an unpredictable admixture of mediocrity and genius, with now and then a flash of greatness.

Our White - Whites were a mixed crowd,including a well - known doctor,owner of a chateau near Versailles,an opera singer with an enormous belly and a chaplainbass;a homosexual architect with a beard,two night club porters,and a lawyer who sold Jewish refugees visas for a Central American Republic,which on arrival turned out to be non valid.

Wherever we find orderly, stable systems in Nature, we find that they are hierarchically structured, for the simple reason that without such structuring of complex systems into sub-assemblies, there could be no order and stability-except the order of a dead universr filled with a uniformly distributed gas.

On successively higher levels of the hierarchy we find more complex, flexible and less predictable patterns of activity, while on successively lower levels we find more and more mechanised, stereotyped and predictable patterns. In the language of the physicist, a holon on a higher level of the hierarchy has more degrees of freedom than a holon on a lower level.

Humour is the only domain of creative activity where a stimulus on a high level of complexity produces a massive and sharply defined response on the level of physiological reflexes.

Consciousness in this view is an emergent quality, which evolves into more complex and structured states in phylogeny, as the ultimate manifestation of the Integrative Tendency towards the creation of order out of disorder, of 'information' out of 'noise'.

The superimposition of two systems: thought and metre,' wrote Proust, 'is a primary element of ordered complexity, that is to say, of beauty.

Because most people ain't people.

The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon—such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.

Die, welche schwierige, dunkle, verflochtene, zweideutige Reden zusammensetzen, wissen ganz gewiss nicht recht, was sie sagen wollen, sondern haben nur ein dumpfes, nach einem Gedanken erst ringendes Bewusstsein davon; oft aber wollen sie sich selber und anderen verbergen, dass sie eigentlich nichts zu sagen haben.

It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.

Hope lies in texts that can accommodate and keep alive our intricacy, our complexity, and our density against the onslaught of the terrifying, sweeping simplifications of fascism.

They had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle

It was possible for Tilo and Musa to have this strange conversation about a third loved one, because they were concurrently sweethearts and ex-sweethearts, lovers and ex-lovers, siblings and ex-siblings, classmates and ex-classmates. Because they trusted each other so peculiarly that they knew, even if they were hurt by it, that whoever it was that the other person loved had to be worth loving. In matters of the heart, they had a virtual forest of safety nets.

I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there's lots to write about. That can't be done in Kashmir. It's not sophisticated, what happens here. There's too much blood for good literature.

NOTHING I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there's lots to write about. That can't be done in Kashmir. It's not sophisticated, what happens here. There's too much blood for good literature. Q 1: Why is it not sophisticated? Q 2: What is the acceptable amount of blood for good literature?

India lives in several centuries at the same time.