Quotes About Complexity

We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.

We must categorize and simplify in order to comprehend. But the reduction of complexity entails a great danger, since the line between enlightening epitome and vulgarized distortion is so fine.

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

Consider the magnitude of this... Taxonomists have described almost a million species of arthropods, and all fit into four major groups; one quarry in British Columbia, representing the first explosion of multicellular life, reveals more than twenty additional arthropod designs!

Genius has as many components as the mind itself.

Intelligence is too complex and multifaceted a thing to reduce to any single dimension.

If Ediacara survivors had been able to evolve internal complexity later on, then the pathways from this radically different starting point would have produced a world worthy of science fiction at its best.

Por qué el origen de la vida pluricelular se dio en forma de un corto pulso a través de tres faunas radicalmente diferentes , y no como un aumento lento y continuo de complejidad? La historia de la vida es infinitamente fascinante, infinitamente curiosa, pero ciertamente no es la sustancia de nuestros pensamientos y esperanzas usuales.

Shall we appreciate any less the beauty of nature because its harmony is unplanned? And shall the potential of mind cease to inspire our awe and fear because several billion neurons reside in our skulls?

Matter is the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God as well, are just words that express the wondrous results of neuronal complexity.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings - words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seem limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out.

And in real life endings aren't always neat, whether they're happy endings, or whether they're sad endings.

The most important things are the hardest things to say, because words diminish them...

People are only rational on the surface.

I think there's always a reason for love, but sometimes hate just is. A kind of free-floating evil.

In our world you got your mystery and suspense stories . . . your science fiction stories . . . your Westerns . . . your fairy tales. Get it?" "Yes," Roland said. "Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?" "I guess that's close enough," Susannah said. "Does no one eat stew?" Roland asked.

no man really knows another man's heart

There is beauty and darkness in everything. Sorrow in joy, life in death, thorns on the rose.

Everyone is a lonely victim of life's complexity.

I am a complicated person with a simple life and I am the reason for everything that ever happened to me.

My life's a tangle of past and present, like two separate puzzles with their pieces tumbled together. Nothing fits.

To a materialist life is nothing but a complex self-sustaining pattern, easily disrupted and gone when destroyed.

In the writer's mind, even a backstory has a backstory.