Quotes About Complexity

On eût dit qu'en parlant un langage dont le caractère enfantin ne permettait pas qu'on le tînt pour un langage, elle donnait aux mots insignifiants l'aspect de mots incompréhensibles. Elle ne disait rien, mais ne rien dire était pour elle un mode d'expression trop significatif, au-dessous duquel elle réussissait à moins dire encore.

Escribir será, en el libro, volverse legible para todos y, para sí mismo, indescifrable?

To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.

We do not have the right to level out all experience into a single world.

N)o explanatory hypothesis is more clear than the very act by which we take up this incomplete world in order to attempt to totalize it and to think it.

Production: not a tree, but bushes of several roots mixed together.

We perceive others as reflections and at the same time as lacunae in relation to ourselves. In effect, it is like a forbidden zone...With others, it will always be impossible to perceive them in their totalities--that is, to perceive them as they perceive themselves.

In a soap bubble as in an organism, what happens at each point is determined by what happens at all the others.

In all identification, elements of sadomasochism are present.

The world, in those of its sectors which realize a structure, is comparable to a symphony.

The universe of thought, like that of perception, is lacunary and baroque in itself.

Ambiguity cannot be resolved, but it can be understood as ultimate.

There is a fitting together of different perspectival views; there is no fitting together of all of them in an absolute knowledge which is completely decentered and final...The passage from the particular to the universal is never finished.

History has no single signification; what we do always has several senses, and this is how an existential conception of history is distinguished from both materialism and spiritualism.

We must stop thinking in terms of causality. Or again we must admit that we are dealing with a webbed causality and not a linear causality.

To love is to affirm more than one can know.

Ambiguity is essential to human existence, and everything we live or think always has several senses.

Girls are infinitely more complicated than boys and women more than men. And there's no doubt about that. We just don't like to think about it. Certainly the men don't like to think about it.

In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger.

You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.

Elizabeth is smart, ruthless, and emotionally damaged ... [i]f Elizabeth's brain was a person, it would have scars, tattoos, and be missing one eye.

Tax complexity itself is a kind of tax.

Es ist bemerkenswert, dass wir gerade von dem Menschen, den wir lieben, am mindesten aussagen können, wie er sei.

She thought it stupid of a woman to want to be understood by a man; the man (said Hanna) wants the woman to be a mystery, so that he can be inspired and excited by his own incomprehension.