Quotes About Complexity

What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It never has done.

N)ot everything fits easily into our systems of classification. The world might be, it turns out, too complicated for us to know.

He was a complicated man, and an unhappy one. But he knew also that the world was full of simple miracles.

Gos had steely pinions and a mad marigold eye, and hopped and flew and mantled his great wings over a fist of raw liver. He cheeped like a songbird and was terrified of cars. I liked Gos. Gos was comprehensible, even if the writer was utterly beyond understanding.

Bölgelerin sahip oldu?u bütün o karma??k tarihleri ve onlar? silmenin, yerlerine daha basit, daha güvenli tarihler koyman?n ne kadar kolay oldu?unu dü?ünüyorum.

Marriage is like twirling a baton, turning hand springs or eating with chopsticks. It looks easy until you try it.

Every man wants a woman to appeal to his better side, his nobler instincts, and his higher nature --- and another woman to help him forget them.

the nice bits of them can never make up for the offensively crappy parts. I

Ammiravo il suo carattere, allo stesso tempo intransigente e flessibile, fidato e imprevedibile, orgoglioso ma anche capace di estrema sincerità, quando permetteva a qualcuno di gettare uno sguardo nella sua anima.

The greater part of historical and natural phenomena are not simple, or not simple in the way we would like. —PRIMO LEVI

How can something be so wonderful and yet so disappointing at the same time?

Truth is simple. They who say that truth is complicated deceive themselves, and the truth is not in them.

En ce point est quelque chose de simple, d'infiniment simple, de si extraordinairement simple que le philosophe n'a jamais réussi à le dire. Et c'est pourquoi il a parlé toute sa vie.

Human life is a continuous thread which each of us spins to his own pattern, rich and complex in meaning. There are no natural knots in it. Yet knots form, nearly always in adolescence.

il a commencé à sortir tout un paquet de grandes phrases qui résonnaient sous la voûte, et qui semblaient n'avoir ni queue ni tête, sauf qu'elles avaient bien la queue et la tête et qu'elles voulaient dire toute la colère et la tristesse qu'Oscar avait à l'intérieur de lui […].

I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex." - 1946

One may guess the why and wherefore of a tear and yet find it too subtle to give any account of. A tear may be the poetical resume of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts! It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma.

From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster -- that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

We all carry around so much pain in our hearts. Love and pain and beauty. They all seem to go together like one little tidy confusing package. It's a messy business, life. It's hard to figure--full of surprises. Some good. Some bad.

We falsely attribute to men a determined character - putting together all their yesterdays - and averaging them - we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support - it is worse than a large family - he is the silent poor indeed.

A novel has a whispering complexity of insinuations.

easy'. Yet sometimes an easy word is translated into a bafflingly polysyllabic alternative. 'Rust', we are assured, is 'the red desquamation of old iron' or 'the tarnished or corroded surface of any metal', while a 'scale' is 'any thing exfoliated or desquamated'. Confusingly, when we turn to the entry for 'desquamation', we are told that it is 'the act of scaling foul bones'.

Like other observers, I look at the U.S health care program and see an administrative monstrosity, a truly bizarre melange of thousands of payers with payment systems that differ for no socially beneficial reason, as well as staggeringly complex public systems with mind-boggling administered prices and other rules expressing distinctions that can only be regarded as weird.