Quotes About Complexity

Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.

You don't need to be a computer scientist to use a Windows Phone. I think you do to use an Android phone.

If you wanted to build the most powerful computer you could, you can't do better than including everything in the universe that's potentially available.

C++ is a ridiculously complicated travesty that few have the excess IQ points to understand enough not to screw up massively.

It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment.

But then life is never neat, it is made up of doors and trapdoors. You move down baroque corridors, and even when you think you know which door to open, you still need to have the courage to choose.

Art should take what is complex and render it simply. It takes a lot of skill, human understanding, stamina, courage, energy, and heart to do that.

Correct me if I'm wrong - the gizmo is connected to the flingflang connected to the watzis, watzis connected to the doo-dad connected to the ding dong.

She abounds with lucious faults.

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

I think that when something happens when you're growing up, like a death or divorce, it does open the world slightly because things aren't as straightforward.

You should never, ever be understood completely. That's like the kiss of death, isn't it? It's a full stop. I don't ever think you should put full stops on thoughts. They change.

Are you always attracted to damaged women?" "I didn't know there were any other kind.

What's 'the shit'?" "The picture we have of one another. Layers and layers of misunderstanding. The picture we have of ourselves. Useless. Presumptuous. Completely cocked-up. Only we go ahead and we live by these pictures. 'That's what she is, that's what he is, this is what I am. This is what happened, this is why it happened—

That people were manifold creatures didn't come as a surprise to the Swede, even if it was a bit of a shock to realize it anew when someone let you down. What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for.

pas la peine de creuser bien loin avec ces gens là, ils portent leur vieil inconscient en bandoulière

The law of living: fluctuation. For every thought a counter-thought, for every urge a counterurge. No wonder you either go crazy and die or decide to disappear.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function," F. Scott Fitzgerald

All models are wrong," the statistician George Box observed, "but some are useful.

On a trip to Russia I bought one of those Matryoshka "nested dolls" that break apart at the waist to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside…it occurred to me to me later that each of us, like the nested dolls, contains multiple selves, making us a mysterious combination of good and evil, wisdom and folly, reason and instinct… (pp.80)

El problema de Dios no es que no sea capaz de hacer ciertas cosas. Su problema es que él ama. El amor le complica la vida a Dios, como se la complica a cualquiera"1.

He learned, like every good novelist, that human behaviour can neither be explained nor predicted, only rendered.

deconstructing a person is easier than constructing one.

Every woman is a mad ugly bad old witch somewhere in her heart.