Quotes About Complexity

Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.

the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

As for the immediate importance of the study of ambiguity, it would be easy enough to take up an alarmist attitude, and say that the English language needs nursing by the analyst very badly indeed. Always rich and dishevelled, it is fast becoming very rich and dishevelled…

The more complicated and powerful the job, the more rudimentary the preparation for it.

You don't love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

We must dare to think 'unthinkable' thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about 'unthinkable things' because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…. A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...

They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.

reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers...annotations, arrows...an oudine of its design...very seriously mislead.

Excellence is inconveniently difficult.

The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it. We have talked enough; but we have not listened. And by not listening we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society—and thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek understanding.

Neatness, madam, has nothing to do with the truth. The truth is quite messy, like a wind blown room.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits

Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

Haven't you seen that part of me as well? A man's many things. To isolate one part of him and judge him on that alone is to do him an injustice, don't you think?

Few things were so sure and simple that they could be taken at face value.

The name philosopher, which meant originally 'lover of wisdom,' has come in some strange way to mean a man who thinks it is his business to explain everything in a certain number of large books. It will be found, I think, that in proportion to his colossal ignorance is the perfection and symmetry of the system which he sets up; because it is so much easier to put an empty room tidy than a full one.

Dear old Uncle Skulky, man, is the impossibly mad relative we all have sleeping in our souls.

But sometimes you can't figure everything out because you can't ever really understand other people. You can't understand why they do what they do. You just have to accept a little mystery, Ben. People are mysterious, the world is mysterious. You can't know everything. You're not supposed to. This isn't a history book. It's just the world. It's a messy place.

I admit--no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed-

Predisposition is not predestination. We humans are much, much more than our DNA.

Every criminal is still a man, a complex of good and bad, fully deserving of our empathy and mercy.