Quotes About Complexity

How many personalities resided in a single body? Was it possible all aspects of a person could be real?

History enters when the space of the possible is vastly larger than the space of the actual.

This web of life, the most complex system we know of in the universe, breaks no law of physics, yet is partially lawless, ceaselessly creative.

In short, given continuous spacetime, there are a second-order infinity of possible histories of the biosphere.

And to come back to the economy for a moment, the lifetime distribution of firms is also a power law. Now

Yet the biosphere constructs itself, evolves, and has persisted for 3.8 billion years.

The biosphere explodes in diversity, creating more and more cracks in the floor of Darwin's nature until the cracks, ever expanding, become the very floor of nature, and nature herself.

We will talk of these things, for there is more to know than we know and more to say than we can say.

You are about to enter the realms of human beings. Be prepared for cruelty and kindness, for friendship and hatred. People are made of all possibilities and conditions.

The human brain is a most unusual instrument of elegant and as yet unknown capacity.

It's very important you learn people as people are. Anybody can go around and write a book about a person, but that book doesn't always tell you that person really. At that particular moment when you are talkin' to that person, maybe that's how that person were. Tomorrow they can be different people.

You love another person not because of his virtues- that is infatuation- but in spite of his faults," he said to her. "Love has no place for idealization.

Trauma is not just one thing.

We humans are a minority of giants stumbling around in the world of little things.

that she is beautiful, an impossible kind of beauty, composed of all the wrong elements: white hair, the flawless but deeply lined skin, the freckles of age dotting the hands and face.

Women are mysterious creatures, Dr Bee.

I have a problem. I am an intellectual, but at the same time I am not very clever.

Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.

one more person ask me if i knew the hijackers. one more motherfucker ask me what navy my brother is in. one more person assume no arabs or muslims were killed. one more person assume they know me, or that i represent a people. or that a people represent an evil. or that evil is as simple as a flag and words on a page.

The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

entailing difficult technical philosophical terms are so different from those of European thought, that they can hardly ever be accurately translated.

Joelle is not convoluted but simple, not sullen but sunny, yet she has the extensive clandestine life of a career criminal, and this used to enthrall Sarah. Now Joelle appears stripped bare, her essence exposed. She's just a party girl, overeager to be liked.

And F. Scott Fitzgerald: The sign of a first-rate intelligence is to be able to hold two opposing ideas at the same time and not have your head explode, he said. Maybe not those words exactly, but something like that.

I love the breadth and space you get to explore character in so-called serialized TV, the novelistic element of maybe being able to find out who people are. But I also very much like the sitcom discipline of having a self-contained episode that you could conceivably, I hope, be able to enjoy in and of itself.