Quotes About Complexity

we never shall discover all the causal chains that operate: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes themselves infinitely small; historians select an absurdly small portion of them and attribute everything to this arbitrarily chosen tiny section.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made

Short stories do not say this happened and this happened and this happened. They are a microcosm and a magnification rather than a linear progression.

If I have learned one thing in the time I have spent here, is that sooner or later everything is linked to everything else. -Domick. Chapter 19, p210

If I have learned one thing in the time I have spent here, is that sooner or later everything is linked to everything else. [ Chapter 19, p210]

The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.

Maybe you have to become a mother to get to the real sense of everything. Or a prostitute.

Grown-ups are an untrustworthy, treacherous lot, they don't take their games in the serious wholehearted way children do, and yet they too have their own games, one more serious than the other, one game inside another, so that it's impossible to discover what the real one is.

The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune. In

The process going on today is the triumph of discontinuity, divisibility, and combination over all that is flux, or a series of minute nuances following one upon the other.

Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others.

Em toda sua extensão, a cidade parece continuar a multiplicar o seu repertório de imagens: no entanto, não tem espessor, consiste somente de um lado de fora e de um avesso, como uma folha de papel, com uma figura aqui e outra ali, que não podem se separar nem se encarar

there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things

Il mondo è così complicato, aggrovigliato e sovraccarico che per vederci un po' chiaro è necessario sfoltire, sfoltire.

The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune.

Calabrian storytelling exhibits a rich, colorful, complex imagination, but within it the logic of the plot is often lost, leaving only the unraveling of the enchantment.

O romance que mais me apetecia ler neste momento deveria ter só como força motriz a vontade de contar, de acumular histórias sobre histórias, sem pretender impor uma visão do mundo, só fazer assistir ao seu crescimento, como uma planta, como que um emaralhado de ramos e folhas...

Life is neither good nor bad; it is original.

È una delle grandi difficoltà della vita d'indovinare ciò che una donna vuole. Ascoltarne le parole non serve, perché tutto un discorso può essere annullato da uno sguardo e neppure questo sa dirigerci quando ci si trova con lei, per suo volere, in una comoda buia stanzuccia.

Per me i miracoli esistono e non esistono. Non bisogna complicarli con troppe storie. Bisogna crederci o non crederci ed in ambedue i casi le cose sono molto semplici.

The music of men's lives' isn't as easy to recognize as the average fool thinks

I want you to know that it is not always easy to love me. That sometimes my chest is a field full of landmines, and where you went last night, you can't go tomorrow. There is no manual, there is no road map, no help line you can call; my body does not come with instructions, and sometimes even I don't know what to do with it. This cannot be easy. But still, you touch me anyway.

To most outsiders, modern mathematics is unknown territory. Its borders are protected by dense thickets of technical terms; its landscapes are a mass of indecipherable equations and incomprehensible concepts. Few realize that the world of modern mathematics is rich with vivid images and provocative ideas.

It's the nature of mathematics to pose more problems than it can solve.