Quotes About Complexity

but he had gained a perspective of thought in which every extreme was seen as a half-truth

The first lesson that the sages of the Upanishads teach their selected pupils is the inadequacy of the intellect. How can this feeble brain, that aches at a little calculus, ever hope to understand the complex immensity of which it is so transitory a fragment?

For one and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent. For example, music is good to the melancholy, bad to mourners, and indifferent to the dead.

Morality, like art, is the achievement of unity in diversity; the highest type of man is he who effectively unites in himself the widest variety, complexity, and completeness of life.

only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

As the life of a society becomes more complex, and the division of labor differentiates men into diverse occupations and trades, it becomes more and more unlikely that all these services will be equally valuable to the group;

Kant is the last person in the world whom we should read on Kant.

All profound utterances have varied facets for diverse minds.

I dealt with so recklessly some years ago in my books Philosophy and the Social Problem (1917), The Story of Philosophy (1926), Transition (1927), The Mansions (or Pleasures) of Philosophy (1929), and On the Meaning of Life (1932). I know that life is in its basis a mystery; a river flowing from an unseen source and in its development an infinite subtlety; a "dome of many-colored glass," too complex for thought, much less for utterance.

What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.

Folly is an endless maze; Tangled roots perplex her ways;

The best often seem the worst

Real life is never, never as simple as a movie.

we think we understand all about the human body but actually we know very little.

There was something facile and shallow about male beauty, she thought.

For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.

A house is sometimes wine. It is sometimes more than a skin.

Silence can be complex too, but you do not get far with silence.

It was as if this early promiscuous mingling of races and ideas, modes of dress and ways of living, was something that was on no one's agenda and suited nobody's version of events. All sides seemed, for different reasons, to be slightly embarrassed by this moment of crossover, which they preferred to pretend had never happened. It is, after all, always easier to see things in black and white.

Mostly these conversations were had over the telephone, burdened by the conceptual difficulties of conflicting priorities, generals talking to engineers, political deputies to architects.

She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.

She has no mother because fatherblood hates with love and pride, but motherblood with hate loves and cohabits.

It's like everything in the world for me is inside a tub full of guts, so that you wonder how there can be any room in it for anything else very important.

It's Cash and Jewel and Varadaman and Dewey Del', pa says kind of hangdog and proud too, with this teeth and all, even if he wouldn't look at us. 'Meet Mrs Bundren', he says.