Quotes About Complexity

How strange it is to realize now that although I was frightened of the emptiness between us, that emptiness was not his fault but mine: I was waiting to see what he would give me, how he would entertain me. And yet I was incapable of being profoundly interested in him or, maybe, in anyone. Just the reverse of what I thought at the time, when it seemed so simple: he was too callow, or too cautious, or just too young, not complex enough yet, and so he did not entertain me, and it was his fault.

Mulher sem homem acaba tão complexada, tão infeliz. Com homem também, tenho ganas de dizer-lhe e dar-lhe o espelho na mão.

A heat full of coldness, a sweet full of bitterness, a pain full of pleasantness, which maketh thoughts have eyes, and hearts, and ears; bred by desire, nursed by delight, weaned by jealousy, killed by dissembling, buried by ingratitude; and this is love.

Presidents quickly realize that while a single act might destroy the world they live in, no one single decision can make life suddenly better or can turn history around for the good.

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. ... We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

I am a deep believer in the unknowability of other people

Human rights are difficult to pin down because their definition, indeed their very existence, depends on emotions as much as on reason.

It was only that his intellect was in such a constant state of multitasking that he seemed to orbit at altitude, separated from those who operated on a more ordinary plane.

People though are rarely all good or all evil but often a mixture of both and we all make mistakes.

We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.

But in the end, one-sided views make for pretty flat-looking works of art.

Relationships nourish us in ways nothing else can. It's the relationships that help unrush us. Relationships can complicate things. But they also have the power to force us into a much simpler rhythm.

Constant reminders that love is doubly edged with the most beautiful potential and the most dangerous pain.

I'm not equipped to handle what she has, both good and bad--and what she has is always a package deal of both.

Jenny Bell, you're quite an enigma. But that's true of every artist. And I'd rather be with a woman who can't be fully known than one who is all surface and no soul.

Everything affects everything else, and you have to understand that whole web of connections.

all these complex systems have somehow acquired the ability to bring order and chaos into a special kind of balance. This balance point—often called the edge of chaos—is were the components of a system never quite lock into place, and yet never quite dissolve into turbulence, either.

Why is it that simple particles obeying simple rules will sometimes engage in the most astonishing, unpredictable behavior?

If the chemistry was too simple and the complexity of the interactions was too low, then nothing would happen; the system would be "subcritical." But if the complexity of the interactions was rich enough-and Kauffman's mathematics now allowed him to define precisely what that meant-then the system would be "supercritical." Autocatalysis would be inevitable. And the order really would be for free.

They believe that they are forging the first rigorous alternative to the kind of linear, reductionist thinking that has dominated science since the time of Newton—and that has now gone about as far as it can go in addressing the problems of our modern world.

You can go extinct, or broke. But here we are on the edge of chaos because that's where, on average, we all do the best.

And when he finally plotted it all up, there it was: the number of cell types in an organism did indeed scale roughly as the square root of the number of genes it had.

M. Mitchell Waldrop

he had to find out what was important about self-reproduction, independent of the detailed biochemical machinery.