Quotes About Complexity

Man is not an omipotent master of the universe, allowed to do with impunity whatever he thinks, or whatever suits him at the moment. The world we live in is made of an immensely complex and mysterious tissue about which we know very little and which we must treat with utmost humility.

Obviously, this atomization of knowledge has not made any public decision-making easier.

Steven Johnson's Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.

In fact, a mere 535 elected senators and representatives can hardly become acquainted with, much less even read, some 175,496 pages of the Federal Register or monitor 2.7 million employees—without the enlistment of more bureaucrats to monitor bureaucrats.12

Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.

You would have imagined her at one moment a maniac, at another a queen.

Often when we think we are knotting one thread, we are tying quite another.

These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.

But who among us is perfect? Even the greatest strategists have their eclipses, and the greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, 'That is all there was!' But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.

Bonapartist democrat. Grey shades of a quiet mouse colour.

Abstruse speculations contain vertigo.

Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a double focus. Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.

This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket, that is to say, something as impenetrable as a forest, as densely populated as a city, as tremulous as a nest, as tenebrous as a cathedral, as aromatic as a bouquet, as lonely as a tomb, as much a living thing as a crowd.

But no sword is simple. Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with one wounds himself with the other.

Todos los actos humanos tienen dos caras!

Love is such a slippery thing.

That's what love is, I think. It's all of it. Tears, anger, joy, struggle. Mostly, it's durable. It lasts.

The truth was, she had never been able to understand how a woman could be capable of passionately adoring her husband while simultaneously despising her children. No, that wasn't right. Mom didn't despise Meredith and Nina. She just didn't care about them.

But the connection between pain and love wasn't linear. It was a web.

I'd always believed that the truth of a person was easily spotted, a line drawn in dark ink on white paper. Now, I wonder. Maybe the truth of who we are lies hidden in all those shades of gray that everyone talks about.

He liked whores. He always had.

how dark a side love could have, how hiding it was the kindest thing you could do sometimes.

She wouldn't have understood how dark a side love could have, how hiding it was the kindest thing you could do sometimes.

They were lovers who didn't love each other, and that made talking easier.