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Quotes About Complexity

The irregularities and abnormalities of the trial in Jerusalem were so many, so varied, and of such legal complexity that they overshadowed during the trial, as they have in the surprisingly small amount of post-trial literature, the central moral, political, and even legal problems that the trial inevitably posed.
~ Hannah Arendt
The complexity comes when revolution is concerned with both liberation and freedom, and, since liberation is indeed a condition of freedom—though freedom is by no means a necessary result of liberation—it is difficult to see and say where the desire for liberation, to be free from oppression, ends, and the desire for freedom, to live a political life, begins.
~ Hannah Arendt
Like love, leadership continued to be something everyone knew existed but nobody could define.
~ Hans Finzel
Er lebte in mehreren Welten, und mehrere Welten leben in ihm.
~ Hans-Christian Oeser
Life isn't lived in the black and white, Wilde. People like to think so nowadays. All the online outrage, things are either all good or all bad. But life is lived in the gray. Life is lived in the nuances.
~ Harlan Coben
When you're young, you think you have all the answers. You're right wing or you're left wing and the other side is a bunch of idiots. You know. When you get a little older, though, you start to more and more see the grays. Now I understand that true idiots are the ones who are certain they have the answers. It is never that simple. Do you know what I mean?
~ Harlan Coben
We know that everything in our lives is complex and gray.
~ Harlan Coben
You learn a lot about relationships when your job, in some ways, is to break them up. But the truth is, almost every relationship has breaking points. Every relationship has fissures and cracks. That doesn't mean it's meaningless or bad or even wrong. We know that everything in our lives is complex and gray. Yet we somehow expect our relationships to never be anything but simple and pure.
~ Harlan Coben
You want to put people in neat categories, make them monsters or angels, but it almost never works that way. You work in the gray and frankly that kinda sucks. The extremes are so much easier.
~ Harlan Coben
You want people lined up, Will. You want the good guys on one side, the bad on the other. It doesn't work that way, does it? It is never that simple. Love, for example, leads to hate. I think that was what started it all. Primitive love.
~ Harlan Coben
Every relationship has fissures and cracks. That doesn't mean it's meaningless or bad or even wrong. We know that everything in our lives is complex and gray. Yet we somehow expect our relationships to never be anything but simple and pure.
~ Harlan Coben
Myron went on. "Horace never knew, did he?" Arthur shook his head. "Anita got pregnant early in our relationship. But Brenda still ended up dark enough to pass. Anita insisted we keep it a secret. She didn't want our child stigmatized. She also—she also didn't want our daughter raised in this house. I understood.
~ Harlan Coben
We want to make people consistent and predictable and simple, but they never are.
~ Harlan Coben
Students cannot imagine that professors have real lives in the same way they can't imagine their parents having sex. On one level, that was fine. On another, I constantly remind them to look past themselves. Part of the human condition is that we all think that we are uniquely complex while everyone else is somewhat simpler to read. That is not true, of course. We all have our own dreams and hopes and wants and lust and heartaches. We all have our own brand of crazy. My
~ Harlan Coben
Maya tried to throw this new information into the mix. When she added it all up—Claire, Joe, the nanny cam, the phone, the strip club, the rest—Maya considered all the possibilities and came up with bubkes. Nothing made sense.
~ Harlan Coben
Part of the human condition is that we all think that we are uniquely complex while everyone else is somewhat simpler to read. That is not true, of course. We all have our own dreams and hopes and wants and lust and heartaches. We all have our own brand of crazy.
~ Harlan Coben
Tessie sat down next to her. "When you're young, you think you have all the answers. You're right wing or you're left wing and the other side is a bunch of idiots. You know. When you get a little older, though, you start to more and more see the grays. Now I understand that true idiots are the ones who are certain they have the answers. It is never that simple. Do you know what I mean?" "I
~ Harlan Coben
who had easy answers, be they on the right or the left, were always wrong. The world is complex. It is never one-size-fits-all.
~ Harlan Coben
We know that everything in our lives is complex and gray. Yet we somehow expect our relationships to never be anything but simple and pure.
~ Harlan Coben
Why do we insist that there can only be one "us," one life that makes us up in our entirety? Why can't we have more than one identity? And why do we have to destroy one life in order to create another? We claim to long for the "well rounded," the Renaissance man or woman inside all of us, yet our only variety is cosmetic. In reality we do all we can to smother that spirit out, to make us conform, to define us as one thing and one thing only.
~ Harlan Coben
When they were alone, Linda Coldren began to pace the room. Myron was again awed by her looks—the paradoxical combination of beauty, strength, and now delicacy. The strong, toned arms, yet the long, slender neck. The harsh, pointed features, yet the soft indigo eyes. Myron had heard beauty described as "seamless"; hers was quite the opposite.
~ Harlan Coben
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
~ E. F. Schumacher
Everybody has a dark side. It's just we are very in touch with it.
~ Jeff Hanneman
Justice and truth are too such subtle points that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.
~ Blaise Pascal