Quotes About Complexity

We meant well, she thought, looking up at a sky piled with cumulus clouds turning amethyst and indigo above the clearing. No one was deliberately evil. We all did the best we could. Even so, what a mess we made of everything Ã¢â'¬Â¦

Despite their mutual ill humor, they fornicated again, mostly because they could more easily ignore each other while doing so.

you can love a person without loving everything about that person.

If we didn't read people who were bastards, we'd never read anything. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

Far as I can tell, a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

Facing the Extreme: Moral life in the concentration camps by Tzvetan Todorov.5 This is a careful study of the moral situation of both prisoners and guards in the German and Russian camps. It shows how much more complex and many-sided that situation was than might have been expected

I am so vast, uncertain and strange

People are messy, unpredictable things.

think of it.' said Robert Rosenbluth, a doctor whose acquaintance i made at the start of this book. 'no engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine tuned as an anus. to call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.

Please beware, came his reply, There are a lot of people who believe that just because we don't have an explanation for something, it's quantum mechanics.

The only conclusion I feel sure of at this point," he mused, "is that women are too complicated.

She warns me about equating complexity with quality. "All that stuff you read on wine bottles, in wine magazines, where they throw out a dozen descriptors? That's not sensory evaluation. That's marketing.

No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.

We are fashioned creatures, but half made up.

We are all each of us riddles, when unknown one to the other. The plain map of human powers and purposes, helps us not at all to thread the labyrinth each individual presents in his involution of feelings, desires and capacities; and we must resemble, in quickness of feeling, instinctive sympathy, and warm benevolence, the lovely daughter of Huntley, before we can hope to judge rightly of the good and virtuous of our fellow-creatures.

Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so viscious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived as noble and godlike.

Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?

I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Man! You

I had always been content to know that there was more in the living world than we could hope to understand.

Her countenance was all expression; her eyes were not dark but impenetrably deep; you seemed to discover space after space in their intellectual glance.

half-right, half-wrong.

There was never a better illustration of the validity of the Enlightenment dream – that order can emerge where nobody is in charge. The genome, now sequenced, stands as emphatic evidence that there can be order and complexity without any management.

We consciously decide whether to consider people; we fall in love despite ourselves; we entirely fail to fall in love with people who fall in love with us. It is a mightily complicated business.

I want to do for every aspect of the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath.