Complexity Quotes - Page 15

• The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Given, Comprehension

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2014). “An Unquiet Mind: A memoir of moods and madness”, p.75, Pan Macmillan

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• Female sexuality is presented in our culture as a male fantasy, which doesn't include the reality of the abuse, the pleasure, the pain, the power, the complexity of women's sexuality.

  Deborah Kampmeier

  Pain, Reality, Abuse

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Angel, Men

  Diary entry regarding Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, in July 1924. "Letters of C. S. Lewis". Book edited by W. H. Lewis, p. 97, 1966.

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• Now, in the development of our knowledge of the workings of Nature out of the tremendously complex assemblage of phenomena presented to the scientific inquirer, mathematics plays in some respects a very limited, in others a very important part. As regards the limitations, it is merely necessary to refer to the sciences connected with living matter, and to the ologies generally, to see that the facts and their connections are too indistinctly known to render mathematical analysis practicable, to say nothing of the complexity.

  Oliver Heaviside

  Nature, Knowledge, Science

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• The beauty of evolution is that it does provide an explanation of how you can get complexity out of simplicity. It does it by slow, gradual degree. At no point are you postulating the sudden coming into existence of a complicated being.

  Richard Dawkins

  Simplicity, Degrees, Doe

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information. And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and complexity - rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication. Or, worse, to fault viewers for a lack of understanding.

  Edward Tufte

  Data, Confusion, Design

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• All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that life's complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did.

  Harold Urey

  Believe, Origin Of Life, Looks

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• Buddha says: Life should be simple, not complex. Life should be based on needs, not on desires. Needs are perfectly okay: you need food, you need clothes, you need a shelter, you need love, you need relationship. Perfectly good, nothing wrong in it. Needs can be fulfilled; desires are basically unfulfillable. Desires create complexity. They create complexity because they can never be fulfilled. You go on and on working hard for them, and they remain unfulfilled, and you remain empty.

  Rajneesh

  Love You, Simple, Clothes

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• The old will disappear. Human level consciousness by itself can no longer resolve the complexities it has created.

  David Spangler

  Spiritual, Wisdom, Healing

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• What shall I say! And how shall I describe this Birth to you? For this wonder fills me with astonishment. The Ancient of Days has become an infant. He Who sits upon the sublime and heavenly Throne, now lies in a manger. And He Who cannot be touched, Who is simple, without complexity, and incorporeal, now lies subject to the hands of men. He Who has broken the bonds of sinners, is now bound by an infant's bands. But He has decreed that ignominy shall become honor, infamy be clothed with glory, and total humiliation the measure of His Goodness.

  Saint John Chrysostom

  Lying, Simple, Men

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• The brain seems to be made up of a bewildering complexity of parts, and the cells within the parts seem to be characterized by an inscrutable complexity of form, extent, and relationships with each other.

  Gordon Shepherd

  Cells, Brain, Form

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• The evolutionary vision is agnostic in regard to systems in the universe of greater complexity than those of which human beings have clear knowledge.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Vision, Agnostic, Clear

  "Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution". Book by Kenneth E. Boulding, 1978.

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• New laws, new kinds of things can emerge as the universe evolves. The more moving parts you have in something, the more possibilities there are. There's a whole new science now of complexity, and what we see is that complexity requires a very different approach than the kind of bottom-up approach that fundamental physics has always used. We're gonna have to think about the world in a different way if we want to address complex systems.

  Adam Frank

  Moving, Thinking, Law

  "Doctor Strange Advisor Explains the Science Behind Marvel's Multiverse". Interview with Screenrant, screenrant.com. March 2, 2017.

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• Perhaps we humans are cosmic dwarfs; perhaps we are molecular giants. But there is no denying our mid-scale complexity. We humans live neither at the range of the infinitely small, nor at that of the infinitely large, but we might well live at the range of the infinitely complex. We live at the range of the most caring; we ourselves might embody the most capacity for caring.

  Holmes Rolston III

  Caring, Humanity, Giants

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• If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon his creation, I should have recommended something simpler.
  Remarking on the complexity of Ptolemaic model of the universe after it was explained to him.

  Alfonso X of Castile

  Should Have, Astronomy, Creation

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• I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation.

  George C. Marshall

  Real, Distance, Men

  The Marshall Plan, delivered 5 June 1947 at Harvard University

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• I end up liking politicians, both left and right, who talk about political matters as if they are addressing a bunch of adults, as if they are capable of handling both complexity and emotional responsibility.

  Rachel Maddow

  Responsibility, Emotional, Political

  Interview with Grace Dunham, www.yahoo.com. April 21, 2016.

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• Through fear of resembling one another, through horror of having to submit, through uncertainty as well, through skepticism and complexity, there is a multitude of individual little beliefs for the triumph of strange little individuals.

  Andre Gide

  Littles, Triumph, Belief

  Andre Gide (2017). “Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality”, p.34, Routledge

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• People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.

  Terry Pratchett

  Summer, Real, Moving

  Terry Pratchett (1996). “Feet of Clay: A Novel of Discworld”, Harper Prism

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• There is salvation - happiness and virtue - in beauty. I would define beauty in this context as a kind of richness, complexity, mystery, diversity, otherness, and unexpectedness - something that comes from the outside.

  Elif Batuman

  Diversity, Kind, Mystery

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• However, a good life consists of more than simply the totality of enjoyable experiences. It must also have a meaningful pattern, a trajectory of growth that results in the development of increasing emotional, cognitive, and social complexity.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Meaningful, Business, Good Life

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2004). “Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning”, p.20, Penguin

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• We all have to expand our capabilities to encompass the changing world, its growing diversity and, indeed, its complexity.

  Lachlan Murdoch

  Change, Diversity, Growing

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• The formation of character in young people is educationally a different task from, and a prior task to, the discussion of the great, difficult, ethical controversies of the day. First things first. And planting the ideas of virtue, of good traits in the young, comes first. In the moral life, as in life itself, we take one step at a time. Every field has its complexities and controversies. And so does ethics. And every field has its basics. So too with values.

  William Bennett

  Character, Ideas, People

  "The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories". Book edited by William Bennett, reason.com. 1993.

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• Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense-only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Life, Simple, Diversity

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History”, p.322, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Creationists have also changed their name ... to intelligent design theorists who study 'irreducible complexity' and the 'abrupt appearance' of life-yet more jargon for 'God did it.' ... Notice that they have no interest in replacing evolution with native American creation myths or including the Code of Hammarabi alongside the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

  Michael Shermer

  Native American, School, Science

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