Quotes About Complexity

She was afraid of her father, and she admired him profoundly, and she thought he was stark mad; but who was she to judge?

When you stopped believing in God did you stop believing in good and evil?" "No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that's an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

human life is difficult; there are profundities and compromises and mysteries that look to the innocent eye like betrayal.

When you stopped believing in God," he went on, "did you stop believing in good and evil?" "No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that's an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that's an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

Las afirmaciones de identidad no están libres de consecuencias. Limitan tanto como robustecen. Para mí, prefiero no tener una de esas identidades sencillas y públicas. No sé lo que soy, y no me apetece especialmente saberlo.

Or when a good character does something bad? It's probably better to think about good or bad actions rather than good or bad characters. People are complicated.

JACK: I don't understand why you feel like an onion.

With every second that went past, with every sentence she spoke, she felt a little strength flowing back. And now that she was doing something difficult and familiar and never quite predictable, namely lying, she felt a sort of mastery again, the same sense of complexity and control that the alethiometer gave her. She had to be careful not to say anything obviously impossible; she had to be vague in some places and invent plausible details in others; she had to be an artist, in short.

No, pero dejé de creer que existían un poder benéfico y un poder malévolo que estaba fuera de nosotros. Y me convencí de que el bien y el mal solo designan las acciones de las personas, no lo que estas son. Solo podemos decir que esta es una buena acción porque beneficia a alguien, y que esa otra es una mala acción porque perjudica a alguien. Las personas son demasiado complejas para ponerles simples etiquetas.

There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.

Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.

I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself.

I did not want to voice a word that would lift the cover and reveal that hideous emotion I always felt for her, the underside of love.

Look, I've got more personalities than I can use already. All you are is one too many.

Simple is never that simple.

Simple was never that simple. Still, the self-questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming too late.

Un piccolissimo simbolo, se ce ne fosse stato bisogno, del milione di circostanze della vita altrui, di quella bufera di dettagli che formano il guazzabuglio di una biografia umana: un piccolissimo simbolo che mi ricordava perchè la nostra comprensione della gente dev'essere sempre, per forza, nel migliore dei casi, difettosa.

In nome della ragione, si cerca sempre un motivo più elevato, un significato più profondo: allora avevo ancora l'abitudine di sforzarmi di essere ragionevole anche sull'irragionevole e cercare la complessità nelle cose semplici. Esigevo risposte dalla mia intelligenza, quando non erano affatto necessarie. Pensavo: non può essere così meschino e insulso come sembra. Questo non può essere che un decimo della sua storia. Deve avere, dentro, qualcosa di più.

The messiness of marriage and children and career and all that—I've already realized the futility of it all without having had to go through it all.

This Garner is an interesting guy. He's both a lawyer and a usage expert (which seems a bit like being both a narcotics wholesaler and a DEA agent).

the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty.

you can prove that there are exactly as many real numbers between 0 and 1 as between 0 and any other finite number you can think of.

Je veux que le lecteur comprenne bien ce qui était en jeu pour moi à ce moment-là. Les guerres d'insurrection et de contre-insurrection sont extrêmement vicieuses puisqu'elles impliquent personnellement tous les hommes, militaires ou civils, des deux camps, qui se trouvent être dans le théâtre d'opérations. Personne