Quotes About Complexity

If, as the dowager had said, we are nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such strangely shaped lives? Wouldn't our genetic purpose—to transmit DNA—be served just as well if we lived simple lives, not bothering our heads with a lot of extraneous thoughts, devoted entirely to preserving life and procreating? Did it benefit the genes in any way for us to lead such intricately warped, even bizarre, lives?

Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language. Olga was absolutely right, Tsukuru thought as he sipped his wine. Not just to explain to others, but to explain to yourself. Force yourself to try to explain it, and you create lies.

Why? she screamed. Are you crazy? You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can read Marx, and you don't know the answer to something as simple as that? Why do you even have to ask? Why do you have to make a girl SAY something like this? I like you more than I like him, that's all. I wish I had fallen in love with somebody a little more handsome, of course. But I didn't. I fell in love with you!

Either way, modernity is doing something to us at a deeply fundamental level, and the fact that we don't understand it is alarming.

If we all knew that we were all perverts, we might be a lot happier.

In Moscow there were a hundred different words for sadness, and one of them was joy.

It showed her that a person's personality could change radically, that you could never really know someone. In fact, you could probably never know yourself. You could think of yourself as the most fun-loving, generous person but actually be cutthroat and indecent.

Love was a paltry, meek thing; it was guilt that spoke in such operatic statements.

all women are unknowable. They all have at least one secret that they are keeping from everybody else. A secret that changes everything you thought about them.

Zij was beminnelijk en hij beminde haar, / hij echter was niet beminnelijk / en zij beminde hem niet. (Een oud stuk)

Why does turning on a TV these days require three remotes with ninety buttons? Why?

The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Mathematics is written for mathematicians.

I made my living in comedy, but I'm not a silly person. I've got all these sides to me. Even in my movies that I've written myself, the characters sometimes border on great anger or nutsiness or other kinds of behavior. I'm not just doing fart jokes for two hours.

History, after all, is a process, not a position, and it is not best written in bronze and marble. It is complex, plastic and ever-changing; all things that heroic statues are not.

The behavioral scientist Karen Stenner has written very eloquently about people who have what she calls an authoritarian predisposition, a personality type that is bothered by complexity and is especially enraged by disagreement. Trump has made himself into the spokesperson for precisely these American authoritarians.

'Watchmen' is not only the greatest comic ever written, it's a really important work of fiction.

First and foremost, telling historical stories is very tricky because it is something that is known. It is not like you can tell a lie or change something that is written in black and white.

People always tell me I'm nothing like my character. Well, hopefully not! He's a character who's very defined. He was purposefully written by Jo Rowling as very one-dimensional in the first few books, because you're supposed to hate him.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Right and wrong are both very subjective, it's all grey.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty. It's also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong.