Quotes About Complexity

Always you were drawn to the composite creatures, the broken and reassembled, for that is what you are.

who knows what we want? We're all mysteries, even to ourselves.

We all have our shortcomings, it seems, though some are less visible than others.

Not everyone is born a witch or a saint. Not everyone is born talented, or crooked, or blessed; some are born definite in no particular at all.

Behind every aspect of the world is another aspect of the world.

Klara seemed, on the contrary, frequently to be emerging. Not from silence into sociability—something other than that. From herself into herself—as if she had been born bearing multiple veils of Klara, and they were all legitimate. Echt.

It is existentially, hyperbolically, quintessentially unknowable.

But though her thoughts were rich and complicated, her words were poor, and she merely grunted.

Keep it simple' wasn't always the right response. Many things that boosted my happiness also added complexity to my life. Having children. Learning to post videos to my website. Going to an out-of-town wedding. Applied too broadly, my impulse to 'Keep it simple' would impoverish me. 'Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings,' warned Samuel Johnson, 'let us therefore by cautious how we strip her.

I was always telling myself, "Keep it simple." But as Albert Einstein pointed out, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

In many ways, the happiness of having children falls into the kind of happiness that could be called fog happiness. Fog is elusive. Fog surrounds you and transforms the atmosphere, but when you try to examine it, it vanishes. Fog happiness is the kind of happiness you get from activities that, closely examined, don't really seem to bring much happiness at all—yet somehow they do.

It's hard to do even simple things well, and most things aren't simple. As

Sometimes words only diminish what I want to convey.

But perhaps the most acute sense of happiness from writing was the happiness of expressing a very complicated idea - the kind of idea that takes hundreds of pages to capture.

Jamie is a funny mix. He has a sardonic side that can make him seem distant and almost harsh to people who don't know him well, but he's also very tender-hearted. (A

I felt light and heavy at the same time. I wondered if the itako we visited had really talked to my dead friend, if they actually talk to anyone, or were they simply meting out consolation at two thousand yen a shot? I didn't care. We are always looking for difficult truths in easy contexts and demanding simple answers within complicated wholes.

I love men, not for what unites them, but for what divides them, and I want to know most of all what gnaws at their hearts.

What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.

And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.

Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.

The devil is in the detail is an idiom that refers to a catch or mysterious element hidden in the details. It derives from God is in the detail attributed to German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969). Earlier on Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) said Le bon Dieu est dans le detail. Meaning that things seem simple at first but are more complex or require more time and effort than expected. The earlier idea is that details are important; whatever one does should be done thoroughly.

No one, ever, can give the exact measure of his needs, his apprehensions, or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity.

It's no easy business to be simple.

Anyway, what was the use? Women's hearts were like those desks full of secret drawers that fit one inside another; you struggle with them, you break your fingernails, and at the bottom you find a withered flower, a little dust, or nothing at all!