Quotes About Complexity

Sometimes things are less than they seem.

The Goldberg Variations is a good example of how symmetry is not just a physical property but pervades many abstract structures.

But how do you teach a child to grasp that complexity? You teach them to grasp the style of thinking. There are no answers, only questions that shape your understanding, and which in turn reveal more questions.

Cooper had a theory about personality. Most people considered personality to be a singular identity. Malleable, sure, but essentially cohesive. But he tended to see people as more of a chorus. Every stage in life added a voice to that chorus. The different iterations of himself—lonely military brat, cocky teenager, faithful soldier, young husband, dedicated father, relentless hunter—they all existed within him.

It's like tossing a dart," he'd said. "There's nothing amazing about it. You throw and it sticks somewhere. But if you try and backtrack every factor that led there, the force of the throw and the angle and the air resistance, all of it had to be perfect, just exactly right, for it to end up where it did.

politicians had long known, people preferred short, catchy answers to complex ones, even if the short answers were oversimplified to the point of ridiculousness. Phrases

As politicians had long known, people preferred short, catchy answers to complex ones, even if the short answers were oversimplified to the point of ridiculousness. Phrases

I don't know if he gets all of it, but he loves it anyway, and you don't have to understand everything about something to love it, do you? In fact sometimes that can make you love something more.

Something else: it always struck me as troubling that the words in books are printed in black and white, when life is anything but. The binary colour of words on a page give the sense of simplicity and clarity. But life doesn't work like that.

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.

I'm sad to report that in the past few years, ever since uncertainty became our insistent 21st century companion, leadership has taken a great leap backwards to the familiar territory of command and control.

The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections

Part of Nietzsche's appeal was that it was easy to read a great deal into his work, and people including socialists, vegetarians, feminists, conservatives and, later, the Nazis did. Sadly, Nietzsche was not available to explain himself; he went mad in 1889 and died in 1900, the year of the Paris Exposition.

There's no explaining love. It stands by itself; it makes mistakes and struggles on its own.

La storia è un millepiedi e ogni piede tira da una parte diversa, e in mezzo c'è il nostro corpo.

La vita, credimi, non è un fascio di speranze perdute, un puzzolente ricamo di mimose, la vita raglia e cavalca nel suo incessante splendore.

Sleeping with a woman is easy. Loving her is an entirely different thing.

It may come as an extraordinary shock to you but you're the only woman who has ever succeeded in getting under my skin. It could be because you're a raving lunatic.

She was so shattered about what kind of man he was -- brutal, tender, passionate. There was little doubt he had some mental disorder.

I will never understand the whole world or even one country. All I can do is try to understand the truth and lies in the simplest choices I face every day.

They tell me they do not believe that people are either black or white-- if that were so, then mixed-race children would all be gray instead of a myriad lovely warm shades of natural brown.

Variant selves haunt the corridors of my brain, people my novels, crowd in like ghosts drawn to blood when friends or strangers tell me secrets, hand me their troubles, sweaters knit of hair and wire.

i find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people

In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry, a yam of a woman of butter and brass