Quotes About Complexity

Any explanation or logic that explains everything so easily has a hidden trap in it.

No one can know everything about another person. Not even God, probably.

Like a button on a shirt buttoned wrong, every attempt to correct things led to yet another fine --not to say elegant-- mess.

Although I didn't think so at the time, things were a lot simpler in 1969. All you had to do to express yourself was throw rocks at riot police. But with today's sophistication, who's in a position to throw rocks? Who's going to brave what tear gas? C'mon, that's the way it is. Everything is rigged, tied into that massive capital web, and beyond this web there's another web. Nobody's going anywhere. You throw a rock and it'll come right back at you.

And worse, I was in love. Love with complications.

What confused and disappointed me, though, was that I could never discover within her something special that existed just for me. A list of her good qualities far outstripped a list of her faults, and certainly far outshone my own, yet there was something missing, something absolutely vital.

People are awkward creatures. A lot more awkward than you seem to realize.

Compared to the complexity of the universe, this world of ours is like the brain of a worm.

Everything was intertwined, with the complexity of a three-dimensional puzzle, a puzzle in which truth was not necessarily fact and fact not necessarily truth.

It might look simple, but it never is. It's just like a root. What's above ground is only a small part of it. But if you start pulling, it keeps coming and coming. The human mind dwells deep in darkness. Only the person himself knows the real reason, and maybe not even then.

Komatsu's view is that there are always two sides to everything, Tengo said. A good side and a not-so-bad side.

What I mean to say is probably something like this: any single human being, no matter what kind of person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle.

Even I would be moved by his kindness at times, but he could, just as easily, be malicious and cruel. He was both a spirit of amazing loftiness and an irredeemable man of the gutter. He could charge forward, the optimistic leader, even as his heart writhed in a swamp of loneliness. He lived in his own special hell.

The darkness behind my closed eyelids was like the cloud-covered sky, but the gray was somewhat deeper. Every few minutes, someone would come and paint over the gray with a different-textured gray - one with a touch of gold or green or red. I was impressed with the variety of grays that existed. Human beings were so strange. All you had to do was sit still for ten minutes, and you could see this amazing variety of grays.

No matter how beautiful a woman might be, she always has imperfections, and likewise no matter how ugly a woman might be, there's always a part of her that is beautiful.

To tell you the truth, though, I loved his weak side, too. I loved it as much as I loved his good side. There was absolutely nothing mean or sneaky about him. He was weak: that's all.

At nineteen, I knew nothing about the inner workings of my own heart, let alone the hearts of others. Still, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of how happiness and sadness worked. What I couldn't yet grasp were all the myriad phenomenon that lay in the space between happiness and sadness, how they related to each other. As a result, I often felt anxious and helpless.

Life: I'll never understand it.

can any of us ever perfectly understand another person? However much we may love them?

Sometimes, in this multifaceted world of ours, inconsistency can be more eloquent than consistency.

We're talking about people, not common denominators.

The world is like a great big overcoat, and it needs pockets of various shapes and sizes.

A circle that has many centers but no circumference

There are some things about myself I can't explain to anyone. There are some things I don't understand at all. I can't tell what I think about things or what I'm after. I don't know what my stregths are or what I'm supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail, the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared, I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I'm not such a wonderful human being.