Quotes About Complexity

He loved florid verbiage and jaw-jaw until he cuts himself on Occam's razor.

Offers herself up whole, without conflicts, a woman who is many things, all at once.

Perhaps the world is not as a simple a place as I would like it to be. No one is following any of the principles that they are supposed to.

It's such a difficult lesson to understand that someone can be wrong in theory and yet right in practice--because we want the world to be black and white, right and wrong, us and them.

Chess is a sea in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe.

My favorite, how did you put it now? Landscapes, animals, plants? Favorite what? Books, music, architecture, painting? I don't have any favorite animals, no favorite mosquitoes, favorite beetles, favorite worms, even with the best will in the world I cannot tell you which birds or fish or predators I prefer, it would also be difficult for me to have to choose much more generally.

People are almost never what you think. Don't even try to figure them out. Something Andy once read in a magazine. Turns out it's true.

Life is simple, it's just not easy.

I was deeply in love with my mother. She was very beautiful and in many ways unattainable. She changed between being very cold and very warm, and she would reject us children on and off. You never quite knew what she would do. But I was very certain of one thing: I loved her passionately. That's one of my earliest childhood memories. That I had such strong ties to my mother.

I stupidly suggested that we do A Dream Play. There were forty-two parts... It was hell. I thought: 'How can I explain to these forty-two people what Strindberg means by "Poor souls, I feel sorry for us."' It doesn't exist in German.

I'm learning everyone has many layers...and one or two don't define us.

On such a night,' I thought, 'were ill and good, Bright and unlovely; precious, tawdry, All mingled into one And pressed against my heart.

Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth -- well, it's like brown -- it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.

There's a great deal going on in the world, and nothing happening—precisely because so much is going on—

To harmonize the One with the Many, this is indeed a difficult adjustment, perhaps the most difficult of all, and so important, withal, that nations have perished from their failure to achieve it.

The judicial system is the most expensive machine ever invented for finding out what happened and what to do about it.

How difficult it is to be simple.

To try to understand another human being, to grapple for his ultimate depths, that is the most dangerous of human endeavors.

Love life seems to be that factor which requires the largest quantity of magical tinkering.

Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.

When a writer tries to explain too much, he's out of time before he begins.

Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

One cannot simply perceive everything, to be able to perceive everything would be to tedious

The more I say the more remains to be said … as soon as I speak it becomes quite clear that, no matter how long I speak, new chasms open. No matter what I say I always have to leave three dots at the end. Whatever description I give always opens the doors to something further, something even darker, perhaps, but certainly something which is in principle incapable of being reduced to precise, clear, verifiable, objective prose.