Quotes About Complexity

His nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out.

With intelligent people, three-quarters of the things they suffer from come from their intelligence.

A woman whom we love seldom satisfies all our needs, and we deceive her with a woman we do not love.

each one of us is not a single person, but contains many persons who have not all the same moral value

for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.

One can seldom admire what one loves.

I felt that I was not penetrating to the full depth of my impression, that something more lay behind that mobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at once to contain and to conceal.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

A real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either.

I was not one man only but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation, in which there appeared, according to the moment, impassioned men, indifferent men, jealous men.

There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning

The stellar universe is not so difficult of comprehension as the real actions of other people.

Relations which are not consecrated by the laws establish bonds of kinship as manifold, as complex, even more solid than those which spring from marriage.

Swann's father, an excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts. Several

sterile, splendid torture of understanding and loving...

Truth is paradox.

the depth and complexity and ugliness and danger of sin in professing Christians is either minimized—since we are already justified—or psychologized as a symptom of woundedness rather than corruption.

They hate us because we don't even know why they hate us.

The very idea of a nation-state intentionally built on ideas and a multiplicity of races, languages and myths doesn't fit into the historic Western framework and therefore cannot be real.

Matters of any consequence are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal; and the trotting round a polygon is severe work for people any way stiff in their opinions. For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times.

Mostly, matters of any consequence are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal; and the trotting around a polygon is severe work for people in any way stiff in their opinions. For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times.

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated

Janey. A problem. He liked her, but only for a couple of hours at a time.

Don't discount that part of who he was just because you didn't know it. None of us are all of who we are to any one person.