Complexity Quotes - Page 33

• Enlightenment after all is to overcome delusion, by way of sensitizing practitioners to complexities and problems of the human situation.

  Kim Hee-jin

  Enlightenment, Overcoming, Way

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• For the problem of decision-making in our complicated world is not how to get the problem simple enough so that we can all understand it; the problem is how to get our thinking about the problem as complex as humanly possible--and thus approach (we can never match) the complexity of the real world around us.

  Harlan Cleveland

  Real, Learning, Simple

  Harlan Cleveland (1966). “The obligations of power: American diplomacy in the search for peace”

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• What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency chaos, complexity, life.

  Robert Charles Wilson

  Oasis, Vacuums, Desert

  Robert Charles Wilson (2011). “Vortex”, p.304, Macmillan

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• Elizabeth Turnage is a woman of grit and grace who lives into the stories of those who join her in this odd journey of seeking God. She honors the complexity of life without ever losing sight of the simple glory of the cross. Her grasp of the mundane and miraculous and their interplay gives a depth and honesty to her story that tugs at the heart and gives us hope our story can matter. Her book will be a clarion call to bring our broken, holy, troubled, and glorious life to the author of all stories: Jesus.

  Dan B. Allender

  Jesus, Honesty, Book

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• I've done a number of films. I've been around this. I think the biggest challenge is just getting the script right, the way that you want the script to be. It's really about capturing the complexity of emotions and creating the kind of characters that people will want to watch every week.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Character, Thinking, Creating

  Source: collider.com

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• In moments of spiritual crisis we naturally fall back upon what worked for us, or seemed to work, heretofore. Sometimes this shows up through the reassertion of our old values in belligerent, testy ways. Regression of any kind is just such a return to old presumptions, often after they have been shown to be insufficient for the complexity of larger questions. The virtue of the old presumptions is that they once worked, or seemed to work, and therein lies if not certainty, then nostalgia for a previous, presumptive security. In our private lives, we frequently fall back upon our old roles.

  James Hollis

  Spiritual, Lying, Fall

  James Hollis (2008). “What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life”, p.101, Penguin

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• Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises.

  James Hollis

  Strange, Surprise, Ambiguity

  James Hollis (2008). “What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life”, p.156, Penguin

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• Treatment of the apparently whimsical fluctuations of the stock quotations as truly non stationary processes requires a model of such complexity that its practical value is likely to be limited. An additional complication, not encompassed by most stock market models, arises from the manifestation of the market as a nonzero sum game.

  Richard Arnold Epstein

  Games, Whimsical, Arise

  "The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic, Revised Edition". Book by Richard Arnold Epstein, Chapter Nine, Weighted Statistical Logic And Statistical Games, 1977.

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• To invoke a Kierkegaardesque figure of speech, the beauty of the language of the Bible can be like a set of dentist's instruments nearly laid out on a table and hanging on a wall, intriguing in their technological complexity and with their stainless steel highly polished--until they set to work on the job for which they were originally designed. Then all of a sudden my reaction changes from "How shiny and beautiful they all are!" to "Get that damned thing out of my mouth!

  Jaroslav Pelikan

  Beautiful, Bible, Jobs

  Jaroslav Pelikan (2006). “Whose Bible Is It?: A Short History of the Scriptures”, p.229, Penguin

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• the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims ... to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy.

  George Eliot

  Spring, Inspiration, Growing

  George Eliot (2016). “The Mill On The Floss”, p.574, George Eliot

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• You know, not every good book needs to be a movie, or a television series, or a video game. There's great work in those mediums, of course, but sometimes a book should remain a book. I still believe nothing tells a story with the richness and complexity of a good novel. When people say they think a book would make a good movie, they say this sometimes because, if it worked, they already saw all the images in the movie theatre that is in their brains. And sometimes that is the way it should stay.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Book, Believe, Thinking

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• Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act. A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of interpretations it provokes.

  Dana Gioia

  Literature, Proportion, Interpretation

  Dana Gioia (2002). “Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture”, Graywolf Pr

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• Today, as we have seen, fascism and communism are discredited, but are replaced by a paraphilic consumer culture driven by fantasy, desperately in search of distractions and escalating sensations, and a fundamentalist culture wherein the rigors of a private journey are shunned in favor of an ideology that, at the expense of the paradoxes and complexities of truth, favors one-sided resolutions, black-and-white values, and a privileging of one's own complexes as the norm for others.

  James Hollis

  Black And White, Journey, Today

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• The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination.

  Susan Sontag

  Illumination, Novelists, Literature

  Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.154, Macmillan

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• Ethnic stereotypes are misshapen pearls, sometimes with a sandy grain of truth at their center. ... but they ignore complexity, change, and individuality.

  Anna Quindlen

  Individuality, Pearls, Sometimes

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• There is nothing “still” in the remarkably visceral poems of Alexander Long's third collection, Still Life, and nothing is at rest in these restless and edgy poems. Conversational and kinetic, these poems chart the traces left by the shifting overlays of the templates of literature, rock-and-roll, and contemporary culture. As each poem in Still Life attempts to fix a focus upon a scene or subject, the protean natures under view draw the poet into the eddies and complexities of reflection. This is a powerful and moving collection of poems.

  David St. John

  Powerful, Moving, Reflection

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• I've always noticed that nobody can be single-minded who isn't narrow-minded; and I think it likely that people who aren't so cocksure what they want to do with themselves, hesitate because they have a great deal more to deal with. A nature rich in fine and complex possibilities takes more time to dispose of itself, but when it does, the world's beauty is the gainer.

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher

  Thinking, People, Doe

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1915). “The Bent Twig”

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• Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Men, Youth, Human Nature

  Ellen Glasgow (2016). “The Miller of Old Church”, p.277, The Floating Press

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• The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened ' it's just wonderful. And . . . the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.

  Douglas Adams

  Mean, Opportunity, Years

  Richard Dawkins' Eulogy for Douglas Adams at Church of Saint Martin in the Fields, www.edge.org. September 17, 2001.

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• The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities.

  Sylvia Plath

  Struggle, Simple, Thinking

  Sylvia Plath (2011). “Letters Home”, p.301, Faber & Faber

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• I am a political recidivist. An incorrigible, repeat voter. A career lever-pusher. My electoral rap sheet is as long as your arm. Over the course of three decades, I have voted for presidents and school board members. I have voted in high hopes and high dudgeon. I have voted in favor of candidates and merely against their opponents. I have voted for propositions written with such complexity that I needed Noam Chomsky to deconstruct their meaning. I have been a single-issue voter and a marginal voter. I have even voted for people who ran unopposed. Hold an election and I'll be there.

  Ellen Goodman

  Rap, School, Careers

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• There might have been a hundred or a thousand life-bearing planets, had the course of evolution of the universe been a little different, or there might have been none at all. They would probably add, that, as life and man have been produced, that shows that their production was possible; and therefore, if not now then at some other time, if not here then in some other planet of some other sun, we should be sure to have come into existence; or if not precisely the same as we are, then something a little better or a little worse.

  Alfred Russel Wallace

  Believe, Men, Body

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• Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means; a complexity of words, movements, gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Mean, Vision, Theatre

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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. It recognizes aesthetic, moral, and religious ideas and experiences as a species, in this case of mental structures or of images, which clearly interacts with other species in the world's great' ecosystem.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Religious, Ecosystems, Ideas

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

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• Because of his capacity for abstract communications and language and his ability to enter in imagination into the lives of others, man is able to build organizations of a size and complexity far beyond those of the lower animals.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Communication, Animal, Men

  "The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society". Book by Kenneth E. Boulding, 1956.

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