Quotes About Complexity

Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.

The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.

Theories should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.

If your life depended on coming up with a tally, if you could straighten its numbers into a flexible line around the moon and back a dozen times, a hundred … still you couldn't count the planets that cohabit this planet.

We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.

No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.

If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

Science has explained nothing the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

sin este sentir trágico y humorístico que me hace ser, ante los otros, un personaje genial o un horror erguido en dos piernas nada fácil de aguantar.

Cómo querer odiar a quien no te ama. Sórdido deseo, el más desenfrenado, el imposible de renunciar. Querer negar a quien no te ama, no te cubre, no te ampara quien no te protege. —¿Qué decirte sino que no puedo? No poder hablar es un acto difícil de contar con palabras. Por eso no se lo dije.

If you are great, El Topo is a great picture. If you are limited, El Topo is limited.

LA MENTE HUMANA es como la vida: un laberinto que a veces saca de quien se pierde en él cosas que jamás habría imaginado.

You can experience and understand history only when you're inside it, but when you're inside it you don't have time or gumption for understanding. All you want is just to stay alive, for which understanding is not necessary. You have no access to history's complex, catastrophic logic, which is indelibly overwhelming and incomprehensible, particularly as you're trying to survive.

Art extends each man's short time on earth by carrying from man to man the whole complexity of other men's lifelong experience, with all its burdens, colors and flavor.

If stupid people didn't insist on thinking they were smart, the world would be a lot simpler.

No matter what tribe you are in - you've got to hand it to the architects of the Brexit Referendum. Taking an incredibly complex decision and reducing it to a Yay or Nay vote is the perfect divide-and-conquer strategy. At a time when the 99% need to rise up against the 1% we are split right down the middle. An absolute guarantee of little change, ever.

Adults . . . they're like this messy tangle of anger and phobias and sadness . . . hopelessness.

Kate realized all these girls were strange in their own way. Maybe everyone was.

You need contradictions to make an ideal.

That a few fanatics had flown airplanes down into all of that seemed less surprising to him than that legions more hadn't yet done the same. Half the world or more was already setting itself against all the complexity in one way or another, going to off to live in caves or gated communities, dreaming of a world with one god, one book, a world small enough to feel that one wasn't lost in it.

The imbroglio of inky cloud swirling overhead contained nimbostratus, cumulonimbus and Lord knows what else