Quotes About Complexity

In general modern man has no solutions

Skeptics become overwhelmed by the different and conflicting accounts of what happiness, justice, truth are all about.

I will tell you why I became a philosopher. I became a philosopher because I wanted to be able to talk about many, many things, ideally with knowledge, but sometimes not quite the amount of knowledge that I would need if I were to be a specialist in them. It allows you to be many different things. And plurality and complexity are very, very important to me.

Like metaphors and works of art, the people who matter to us are all, so far as we are concerned, inexhaustible. They always remain a step beyond the furthest point our knowledge of them has reached—though only if, and as long as, they still matter to us.

Woman's at best a contradiction still.

Even though I am a mathematician, I look at [fetal development] with marvel: How do these instruction sets not make mistakes as they build what is us?

The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go — the complexity of these mathematical models is beyond human comprehension.

All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.

Sometimes the alternative to black and white isn't gray; it's, say, orange.

Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!

What I need is a woman who is something, anything: either very beautiful or very kind or in the last resort very wicked; very witty or very stupid, but something.

Je connais peu les femmes; mais il me semble qu'il est difficile qu'on admire ce qu'on ne comprend pas

Today, it takes more brains and effort to make out the income-tax form than it does to make the income.

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

You do not need to have a 2,400-page bill come out of Washington, D.C.

Songs are songs, and to reduce them is to waste them.

Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.

I think what makes people fascinating is conflict, it's drama, it's the human condition. Nobody wants to watch perfection.

I always write these movies that are far too big for any paying customer to sit down and watch from beginning to end, and so I always have this big novel that I have to adapt into a movie as I go.

You cannot simplify human intelligence, emotion, and growth. To watch the frills and furbelows of a human psyche is fascinating.

I guarantee there's people who watch television who have no idea how complicated it is to make a television show.

I never realized it until I watched an interview, but sometimes my brain stutters between thoughts, and for some reason it comes out as an 'ummmm.' I'm hoping it's because I'm so smart, and there's just too much information to process, but it's more than likely just because it's a small processor.

I love 'Annie Hall'; I will always come back to that film again and again. Diane Keaton has been such an inspiration to me. She always brings humour, but complexity, and I love watching her on screen. She's got real charisma.

One of the things I like about a character: I always think it's fascinating when a character can turn on a dime and go from one emotion to another. I like watching that.