Quotes About Complexity

Things rarely happen for a single reason. Even the cleverest and most skilled manipulators recognize that their real art lies in making use of that which they cannot predict.

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.

Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity

...how absurd human beings are and how magnificent.

I look for ambiguity because life is ambiguous!

For me, good films and good books are irreducible to a lesson. You can't just kind of translate them into one statement. On the contrary, the more you do that, the less wisdom in art there is.

People are annoyed with the Chinese for not respecting more human rights. But with a population that size it's very difficult to have the same attitude to human rights.

Hospital life--with its byzantine array of moving parts layered atop the unpredictable rhythms of illness--is a permanent state of flux.

Men don't sleep with you when they love you, but they do sleep with you without a second thought when they don't.

It's sick how you can be intimate with someone one minute and then be furious with that same person the next.

In my experience all boys can be classified as either assholes or bores, unless they're both.

I know the names of every intelligent being, the spots on the wings of every butterfly that broke out of a cocoon, the genetic codes of the simplest and most complex of creatures. I know how suns functioned, how worlds formed, how life evolved. All of the secrets of the old universes are mine. They can be yours too, if you want me to share, though I suspect you aren't bothered.

There are some things in life we can never understand, things we are better off not understanding.

I hoped the writing would help me get things straight in my head, especially with regards to Kurda, but I was just as confused by the end as I'd been at the beginning. No matter how I looked at it, I couldn't help feeling that Kurda had been both a hero and a villain. Things would be simpler if he was one or the other, but I couldn't pigeonhole him. It was just too complicated.

She's cute, but she's cuckoo. She wouldn't be his daughter if she wasn't. You can't tell how much of what she says is what she thinks. And you can't tell how much of what she thinks ever really happened.

It's tough, him getting it like that. Miles had his faults same as the rest of us, but I guess he must've had some good points too.

Men have thought me beautiful and I have played with them. Women are like that. Men have loved me, and doing what I liked with them, I have found men contemptible. And then comes this little fat detective whose name I don't know, and he acts as if i were a hag - an old squaw. Can I help then being piqued into some sort of feeling for him? Women are like that.

I don't," he said, "and that's a fact. I just can't size them up at all. This Mrs. Jorgensen, now, what is she?" "A blonde.

Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth.

The issue is complex, but like many matters in Sudan, it is not as complex as Khartoum would want the west to believe.

The world is undergoing a movement toward authoritarianism, Delaney, and this is about order. People think the world is out of control. They want someone to stop the changes. This aligns perfectly with what the Every is doing: feeding the urge to control, to reduce nuance, to categorize, and to assign numbers to anything inherently complex. To simplify. To tell us how it will be. An authoritarian promises these things, too.

I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. —Oliver Wendell Holmes

Often, on the low-tech side, the more "executive" something looks, the more dysfunctional it really is.

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.—Dee Hock