Quotes About Complexity

A human being is a morass, a swamp, a jungle.

What a terribly complex thing his life must be to be able so utterly to surprise its owner!

I know how he is . . . and I can see he's not a convenient man to be in love with.

They had become, year by year, month by month, mysterious to her, her love for them an extended pain, a web or field of force, of which she felt at times the almost breaking tension.

The activity of translating, which had seemed the plainest thing in the world, turned out to be an act so complex and extraordinary that it was puzzling to see how any human being could perform it.

There's only one thing the matter and that's everything.

rabbit hole of relativism.

Have you ever been in love? ...in a way. It's always 'in a way.

No excellent soul is exempt from mixture of madness

Nijedna savršena duša nije lišena neke mešavine ludila. Aristotel

I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the Universe.

You see, proteins, as I probably needn't tell you, are immensely complicated groupings of amino acids and certain other specialized compounds, arranged in intricate three-dimensional patterns that are as unstable as sunbeams on a cloudy day. It is this instability that is life, since it is forever changing its position in an effort to maintain its identity--in the manner of a long rod balanced on an acrobat's nose.

With the destruction of our social fabric, science will be broken into a million pieces. Individuals will know much of exceedingly tiny facets of what there is to know.

You must have minimalism because every change, any change, has myriad side effects that can't always be allowed for. If the change is too great and the side effects too many, then it becomes certain that the outcome will be far removed from anything you've planned and that it would be entirely unpredictable.

There is a longing for a supposedly simple and virtuous past that is almost universal among the people of a complex and vicious society.

if we look forward to a future in which mankind behaves rationally and avoids self-destruction, we can visualize a world that will be more complicated than the one we know today, but a world that will run better and, most of all, a world in which the individual will count for more, not less.

Actually, they where the Simple-Lifers, hungering after a life, which to those who lived it had probably appeared not so Simple, and who had not been, therefore, Simple-Lifers themselves.

There is nothing straight about you; no motive that hasn't another behind it; no statement that hasn't three meanings.

During the century after Newton , it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.

A really good story does not answer everything. After all, life doesn't answer everything. There remain ambiguities. There remains room for doubt.

Life is not like a murder mystery. In mysteries people always do the same thing. Then when some little thing is out of line, some wise-guy amateur detective makes big deductions. In real life, people don't do the same things all the time. They do different things at different times. In real life, people are crazy.

the telemetrists began to use a computer to program the computer that designed the program for the computer that programmed the robot-controlling computer. There was nothing but confusion.

You seek to trap me into an inconsistency. If you were an amoeba who could consider individuality only in connection with single cells and if you were to ask a sperm whale, made up of thirty quadrillion cells, whether it was one or many, how could the sperm whale answer in a way that would be comprehensible to the amoeba?

Ardo dal desiderio di spiegare, e la mia massima soddisfazione è prendere qualcosa di ragionevolmente intricato e renderlo chiaro passo dopo passo. È il modo più facile per chiarire le cose a me stesso.