Quotes About Complexity

There was something of the beautiful failure about her.

Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.

What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely.

Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew.

He was aware that the essence of proper intelligence was the embrace of contradiction.

It's nonviolence that is hard to deal with, whether coming from Israelis or Palestinians or both. It's confusing to them.

He was aware that the essence of proper intelligence was the embrace of contradiction. And the recognition of complexity was to be balanced against the need for simplicity

Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.

She was all the delights of heaven and the fires of hell at once.

Frank pitied anyone naïve enough to believe they could predict with certainty how another human being would act.

Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils.

How can we dare to predict the behavior of man?

The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils. Certainly, it was a considerable achievement for a guard or foreman to be kind to the prisoners in spite of all the camp's influences, and, on the other hand, the baseness of a prisoner who treated his own companions badly was exceptionally contemptible

To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: "Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?" There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds for human existence.

Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.

How can we dare to predict the behavior of man? We may predict the movements of a machine, of an automaton; more than this, we may even try to predict the mechanisms of dynamisms of the human psyche as well. But man is more than psyche.

Reductionism deprives the human phenomenon of its very humanness, by making it a mere epiphenomenon, that is to say, by reducing a human phenomenon to intrinsically subhuman phenomena.

it would be very much a mistake to paint Ward as either innocent or a victim.

The future we face at the dawn of the twenty-first century is, like all futures left to themselves, "emergent, complex messiness." Its "messiness" lies not in disorder, but in an order that is unpredictable, spontaneous, and ever shifting, a pattern created by millions of uncoordinated, independent decisions.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

I am not one and simple, but complex and many.

It is no use trying to sum people up.

He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.

But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.