Quotes About Complexity

Let me love you, but don't love me back. Do love me and let me hate you for a while. Let me feel like I have some control, because I know I never do.

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret.

Men are different. When they are in love they may also have other girlfriends.

I have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

Love is a mess, at best, and I figure it can be very real in spite of all the things people try to attach to it.

I am very interested and fascinated how everyone loves each other, but no one really likes each other.

Where there is love, there is often also hate. They can exist side by side.

For the people that I love I only have one face but for some people we can't have one face.

I hate people but I love gatherings.

the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don't know anything about them at all.

I find that most people worth knowing are fucked up in some way or another.

apology. "It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.

Then I'm telling it wrong." "Bad?" "Yes. Divorce shouldn't be friendly. It just makes everything that much more confusing

I sift through the jumble of emotions she evokes in me, trying exactly to isolate what it is I feel for her, which is like untying a severely knotted rope, where all you end up with is more knots in a different configuration.

He loved a girl once; for no particular reason, just a lot of little ones thrown together. Isn't that what love is, anyway? The sum of a million intangibles that all come together in just the right way at just the right time? Like conception. Or the universe.

It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.

I'm not the same person I was. I'm fucked up." I give her a sideways glance. "I am," she says. "You haven't even scratched the surface." "I find that most people worth knowing are fucked up in some way or another.

you realize that you don't understand yourself any better than you understand anyone else.

I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?

You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don't know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.

Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.

Our behavioral patterns are exceedingly complex, and psychology is a young science. The scope of our behavioral wisdom exceeds the breadth of our explicit interpretation. We act, even instruct, and yet do not understand. How can we do what we cannot explain?

Ask yourself what you would require to be motivated to undertake the job, honestly, and listen to the answer. Don't tell yourself, "I shouldn't need to do that to motivate myself." What do you know about yourself? You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can't even set the clock on your microwave. Don't over-estimate your self-knowledge.