Complexity Quotes - Page 29

• In many areas of understanding, none so much as in our understanding of God, we bump up against a simplicity so profound that we must assign complexities to it to comprehend it at all. It is mindful of how we paste decals to a sliding glass door to keep from bumping our nose against it.

  Robert Breault

  God, Glasses, Doors

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• As the mind learns to understand more complicated combinations of ideas, simpler formulae soon reduce their complexity; so truths that were discovered only by great effort, that could at first only be understood by men capable of profound thought, are soon developed and proved by methods that are not beyond the reach of common intelligence. The strength and the limits of man

  Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet

  Men, Ideas, Profound

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• The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings. Where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world.

  John Cheever

  Struggle, Men, Records

  National Book Award, September 1958.

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• I believe not only in "special providences," but in the whole universe as one infinite complexity of "special providences.

  Charles Kingsley

  God, Believe, Special

  Charles Kingsley (2008). “Daily Thoughts (EasyRead Large Edition)”, p.41, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Cosmos, Answers, Duration

  "The Dispossessed". Book by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974.

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• If you search the scientific literature on evolution, and if you focus your search on the question of how molecular machines - the basis of life - developed, you find an eerie and complete silence. The complexity of life's foundation has paralyzed science's attempt to account for it; molecular machines raise an as-yet-impenetrable barrier to Darwinism's universal reach.

  Michael Behe

  Eerie, Silence, Focus

  "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution". Book by Michael Behe, 1996.

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• In products of the human mind, simplicity marks the end of a process of refining, while complexity marks a primitive stage. Michelangelo 's definition of art as the purgation of superfluities suggests that the creative effort consists largely in the elimination of that which complicates and confuses a pattern.

  Eric Hoffer

  Art, Simplicity, Effort

  "Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook" by Tom Bethell in Harper's Magazine, July 2005.

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• The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence.

  Fred Brooks

  Essence, Essentials, Abstract

  "No Silver Bullet". Book by Fred Brooks, 1986.

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• No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple. In certain cultures, an overall symmetry may conceal the complexity of the work at first glance.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Art, Simple, Style

  Rudolf Arnheim (1974). “Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order”, p.49, Univ of California Press

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• What's changed? I'm a dad. That's fundamental. Watching your kids grow, you go back a bit. You can watch a bug crawling around for minutes at a time--just sit and marvel at its complexity, the utter bugness of it. I've learned to do that again.

  Bob Weir

  Dad, Kids, Watches

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• Political society wants things simple. Political scientists know them to be complex... One could argue that, in part, the leftist impulse is so conspicuous among the educated and well-to-do precisely because they are exposed to more information, and are accordingly forced to choose between living with the strains of complexity, or lapsing into simplism.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Simple, Political, Want

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1975). “Coping: On the Practice of Government”, Vintage Books USA

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• To be an ethical leader is indeed to be different. This kind of leader acknowledges the complexity of running a responsible business, yet tries to do it anyway.

  Andrew Leigh

  Running, Responsible Business, Leader

  Andrew Leigh (2013). “Ethical Leadership: Creating and Sustaining an Ethical Business Culture”, p.6, Kogan Page Publishers

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• One of the most important virtues of the American character is our ability to approach the complexities that life presents us with common sense and decency, .. The considered judgment of the American people is not going to rise or fall on the fine distinctions of a legal argument but on straight talk and the truth. It is time for the president and the Congress to follow that common sense for the good of the country.

  Dick Gephardt

  Country, Fall, Character

  "Top Democrats rip Clinton's defense strategy". www.cnn.com. September 14, 1998.

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• One of the things I'm trying to do over and over again in my books is create new mythologies, create new ways to understand the complexity of the world. I think what mythology does is impress upon chaotic experience the patterns, hierarchies and shapes which allow us to interpret the chaos and make fresh sense of it.

  Clive Barker

  Book, Thinking, Trying

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• Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Self, People

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Against Interpretation and Other Essays”, p.150, Penguin UK

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• Even in the deepest love relationship - when lovers say 'I love you' to each other - we don't really know what we're saying, because language isn't equal to the complexity of human emotions.

  Duane Michals

  Love You, Love Relationship, Emotion

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• The Analytical Engine might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine… Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.

  Ada Lovelace

  Expression, Numbers, Musical

  "Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage". Book by L.F. Menabrea. Scientific Memoirs (Richard Taylor): 694, 1842.

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• The consumer wants food to be as cheap as possible. The producer wants it to be as expensive as possible. Both want it to involve as little labor as possible. And so the standards of cheapness and convenience, which are irresistibly simplifying and therefore inevitably exploitive, have been substituted for the standard of health (of both people and land), which would enforce consideration of essential complexities.

  Wendell Berry

  Land, People, Essentials

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• The ecology of the valley was complex beyond our understanding, and it began to die as we went on manipulating it in ever more frantic ways. As it went dead and empty of the old life it became a place where no one wanted to live. In our right minds we want to seek out places that reek of complexity. Our drive to industrialize soured and undercut the intimacies that drew most people to country life in the first place.

  William Kittredge

  Country, Land, People

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• With the arrival of the new comes the need to overcome fascination with novelty in order to approach substance and sophistication - a sophistication born of subtlety and depth of perception, not complexity and perceived virtuosity.

  John Paul Caponigro

  Technology, Order, Perception

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• I have tried (I am not sure how successfully) to write plain tales. I dare not say they are simple; there is not a simple page, a simple word, on earth -\-\ for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Simple, Earth

  Jorge Luis Borges (2005). “Brodie's Report: Including the Prose Fiction from In Praise of Darkness”, Penguin Classics

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• It is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Real, Yesterday, Essentials

  Doug Jenness, Vladimir Ilích Lenin, Ernest Mandel, Socialist Workers Party. National Education Dept (1985). “Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution”, Pathfinder Pr

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• Anthropology has reached that point of development where the careful investigation of facts shakes our firm belief in the far-reaching theories that have been built up. The complexity of each phenomenon dawns on our minds, and makes us desirous of proceeding more cautiously. Heretofore we have seen the features common to all human thought

  Franz Boas

  Mind, Dawn, Development

  Franz Boas (1989). “A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911”, p.108, University of Chicago Press

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• Caress the detail, the divine detail.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Religion, Details, Chaos

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• A diverse ecosystem will also be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another. When a particular species is destroyed by a severe disturbance so that a link in the network is broken, a diverse community will be able to survive and reorganize itself... In other words, the more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.

  Fritjof Capra

  Ecosystems, Broken, Community

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