Quotes About Complexity

People, you'll find, aren't usually all good or bad. Sometimes they're just a little bit good and a whole lot bad. And sometimes they're mostly good with a dash of bad. And most of us, well, we fall in the middle somewhere.

That's pretty much our story: Melanie and Scarlett, Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane, the soccer moms and the vampire slayers. All of them are more complicated than they let on.

Near the gardens, Pei stopped and caught her breath. She liked sweet-voiced Song Lee and hoped for the best in dealing with the other sisters, but Pei rememered all too well the different personalities that had affected her life, first at the girls' house, then at the silk factory and sisters' house. Dealing with so many people was often like playing a game of chess. There were so many pieces, all moving in different directions. It was always wise to guard all sides against capture.

Not unknown am I to the goddess [Venus] who mingles with her cares a sweet bitterness.

That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.

The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them -which- we are missing.

The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them we are missing.

The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves, which leave us to wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them that we are missing.

This,' whispered the Doctor to Romana, 'is going to be like trying to find a book about needles in a room full of books about haystacks.

We can never do merely one thing.

So much of language is unspoken. So much of language is compromised of looks and gestures and sounds that are not words. People are ignorant of the vast complexity of their own communication.

It's so hard to communicate because there are so many moving parts. There's presentation and there's interpretation and they're so dependent on each other it makes things very difficult.

The human lanuage, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.

I marveled at them both; how difficult it must be to be a person. To constantly subvert your desires. To worry about doing the right thing, rather than doing what is most expedient.

So much of language is unspoken. So much of language is comprised of looks and gestures and sounds that are not words. People are ignorant of the vast complexity of their own communication.

In the age of upheaval, the quantities of foresight and ingenuity required to run a large organization exceed the abilities of any single human being or small team—and the bar keeps going up. Simply put, bureaucratic structures ask more of leaders than they can deliver.

The cost in terms of extra time from having to task switch depends on how complex or simple the tasks are

When decisions were finally made, they had generally been vetted by so many parties that no one person could be held accountable.

I have adopted what I call a "fat book" strategy. A movement that seeks to change the world cannot make its claims believable with only short books. The world is much too large and much too complex to be capable of being restructured in terms of large-print, thin paperback books - the only kind of books that most Christians read these days. The best that any movement can expect to achieve if it publishes only short books is to persuade readers that the world cannot be changed.

Golf is a puzzle without an answer. I've played the game for 40 years and I still haven't the slightest idea how to play.

Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s, and for other generations it will be something else. Change is scary for everyone, as is complexity, contradiction, and an uncertain future.

She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.

Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.

The goal of this book is to highlight the computational beauty found in nature's programs.