Quotes About Complexity

Elizabeth kyk meewarig na hom. "Ons het nie 'n hede in hierdie land nie, Ian. "Ons het net 'n onafgehandelde verlede. En dáárvan is jy die beste voorbeeld wat ek ken.

I myself am made up of so many people.

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.

We live in a vastly complex society which has been able to provide us with a multitude of material things, and this is good, but people are beginning to suspect we have paid a high spiritual price for our plenty.

A taste for simplicity cannot endure for long.

He is like everyone else, a compound of strange and inexplicable contrasts, and this is what the writers of novels and plays will never understand; they make their characters all of a piece. But people are not like that. There may be ten different people in one man, and sometimes all ten appear within a single hour (Wednesday 7 December 1853).

Par quelle triste fatalité l'homme ne peut-il jamais jouir à la fois de toutes les facultés de sa nature, de toutes les perfections dont elle n'est susceptible qu'à des âges différents?" (Mardi 9 octobre, 1849)

It is one of the saddest things in life that we can never be completely known and understood by any one man. (9 June 1823)

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong" is the warning posted by H. L. Mencken.

These labels are inevitable and in many ways useful but the common element to them is that they are impersonal and partial; when they become all-encompassing, which they too frequently do, they distort our core identity. They say almost nothing, or what is even worse, the wrong thing, about who we actually are.

Without stories we end up with stereotypes -- a flat earth with flat cardboard figures that have no texture or depth, no INTERIOR.

Mourning Becomes Electra

Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.

Indeed, if a mathematician is asked to justify his interest in complex numbers, he will point, with some indignation, to the many beautiful theorems in the theory of equations, of power series, and of analytic functions in general, which owe their origin to the introduction of complex numbers. The mathematician is not willing to give up his interest in these most beautiful accomplishments of his genius.

A new ignorance is on the horizon, an ignorance borne not of a lack of knowledge but of too much knowledge, too much data, too many theories, too little time.

The more we learn about the planet, the stranger it becomes to us.

When someone casually asks me "How are you doing?", I sometimes find myself hesitating, as if caught in a micro-catatonia. The question is both petty and cosmic at the same time. Then I remember: just say "Fine.

Isn't hate—twisted love?

When he says, "Why can't you follow a recipe?" I am hurt, because I know that he is not just asking why I can't be told what to do, but also why I can't let things be simple.

Wonder is the sense, which comes in a flash but won't go away, that things are not as straightforward as they seem, that the ordinary way, or explanation and argument leaves you with unbearable contradictions and impossibilities.

the popular conception of the gene as a simple causal agent is not valid. The idea that there is a gene for adventurousness, heart disease, obesity, religiosity, homosexuality, shyness, stupidity, or any other aspect of mind or body has no place on the platform of genetic discourse.

Do not ever expect that anything applies completely to one person.

illustrates the complex relationship between language and message. Words are intricate enough, but the way they are said adds a while extra dimension to the problem of interpretation.