Quotes About Complexity

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.

One of the problems maths struggles with is that it's invisible. We haven't got explosions on our side.

What interests me are the complexities and contradictions and struggles and joys of messy human beings.

It's always interesting to see somebody struggling with two different sides of their personality.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

The opportunities I've had to play really complex characters - which haven't been a lot, but some - you never get over them.

It felt very fresh to me, and it feels very contemporary - this idea that conflict's not being about good and evil and not necessarily being black and white. If you dig deep enough, you'll often find that people do things because they feel that they have to as opposed to because they are evil.

There's something in this country that is so opposed to understanding the complexity of children.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. That's what you have to do: you have to be confident in your potential and aware of your inexperience.

I can easily hold two opposing beliefs at the same time without any problem, which I find - well, mind-expanding, really.

I try not to interpret things of the world into a single meaning. Rather, I try the opposite.

I'm nothing more than what you actually see, but I am also the complete opposite.

Mourinho and Zidane are very different, one could say they are opposites. But it's not like one is bad and the other is good.

At most large companies, what is locally optimal for you is very frequently not what is globally optimal for the company.

Comparing science and religion isn't like comparing apples and oranges - it's more like apples and sewing machines.

Why write for the orchestra? For one thing it's a very challenging problem.

In western classical music with an orchestra, you focus the orchestra on melodies and harmony. In African music, the biggest focus is on rhythms and counter-rhythms - the complexity of rhythms.

The pancreas is by far the most complex organ in the body.

The beauty of compounding iterative algorithms - evolution, fractals, organic growth, art - derives from their irreducibility.

I'm predisposed to believe we live in a complicated, enmeshed reality. There's no authentic or organic.

You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Families are complex organisms.