Complexity Quotes - Page 36

• If it be true that God and man are in one image or likeness (and the affirmation that they are so is not unplausible) then it is the duty of man to bring out into its full splendor that Divine Image which is latent, on one side, in the complexity of his own nature.

  William Batchelder Greene

  Men, Sides, Splendor

  William Batchelder Greene (1872). “The blazing star; with an appendix treating of the Jewish Kabbala, also a tract on the philosophy of H. Spencer, and one on New-England transcendentalism”, p.4

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• The Phoenix Project is a must read for business and IT executives struggling with the growing complexity of IT.

  Jim Whitehurst

  Struggle, Phoenix, Growing

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• Yeah, leading an examined life, I always say, is a pain in the ass. It adds an element of complexity to business that most businessmen don't want to hear about. They just want to call a fabric manufacturer, and say, "Hey, give us 10,000 yards of shirting."

  Yvon Chouinard

  Business, Pain, Giving

  "The TH Interview: Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia". Interview with Jacob Gordon, www.treehugger.com. February 7, 2008.

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• The discovery of radioactivity created a momentary chaos in chemistry and physics; but it soon led to a fuller interpretation of the old ideas. It dispersed many difficulties, harmonized many discords, and yea, more! It shewed the substance of Universe as a simplicity of Light and Life, manners to compose atoms, themselves capable of deeper self-realization through fresh complexities and organizations, each with its own peculiar powers and pleasures, each pursuing its path through the world where all things are possible.

  Aleister Crowley

  Organization, Ideas, Light

  "Magick Book IV: Liber ABA". Book by Aleister Crowley. Appendix VI: A few principal rituals - Liber Reguli, 1936.

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• ... we are the products of our past. ... a web of complexities.

  Janet Leigh

  Past, Our Past, Products

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• Because a garden mean constantly making choices, it offers almost limitless possibilities for surprise and satisfaction.

  Jane Garmey

  Creativity, Mean, Garden

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• The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Order, Achievement, World

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.44, Penguin

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• Art arises in those strange complexities of action that are called human beings. It is a kind of human behavior. As such it is not magic, except as human beings are magical. Nor is it concerned in absolutes, eternities, "forms," beyond those that may reside in the context of the human being and be subject to his vicissitudes. Art is not an inner state of consciousness, whatever that may mean. Neither is it essentially a supreme form of communication. Art is human behavior, and its values are contained in human behavior.

  Baker Brownell

  Art, Communication, Mean

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• Views of women, on one side, as inwardly directed toward home and family and notions of men, on the other, as outwardly striving toward fame and fortune have resounded throughout literature and in the texts of history, biology, and psychology until they seem uncontestable. Such dichotomous views defy the complexities of individuals and stifle the potential for people to reveal different dimensions of themselves in various settings.

  Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

  Home, Men, Views

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• The aspects of global warming that matter most to people - how rapidly will the seas rise? Are hurricanes already getting stronger? How strong will they get as a result of warming? Those are still immersed in complexity. So in those realms that catch people's attention most, or that get used as symbols by environmental campaigners, those facets really do come with significant back-and-forthing.

  Andrew Revkin

  Strong, Sea, People

  "Q&A: Andrew C. Revkin". Mother Jones Interview, www.motherjones.com. November/December 2008.

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• A second possible approach to general systems theory is through the arrangement of theoretical systems and constructs in a hierarchy of complexity, roughly corresponding to the complexity of the "individuals" of the various empirical fields... leading towards a "system of systems." [...] I suggest below a possible arrangement of "levels" of theoretical discourse...(vi) [...] the "animal" level, characterized by increased mobility, teleological behavior and self-awareness...

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Animal, Self, Mobility

  "General systems theory - the skeleton of science". Kenneth E. Boulding, Management Science, Volume 2, No. 3 (pp. 200-201), April 1956.

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• I would love to photograph Angelina Jolie. A friend of mine is working with her on her next film and told me what I was already suspecting, that she is extremely interesting. I have never seen a picture of her that conveys all of her complexity. That would be a fabulous challenge, to find that in a photograph.

  Peter Lindbergh

  Interesting, Challenges, Would Be

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Creativity, Diversity, Making Love

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• Life as it unfolds in front of the camera is full of so much complexity, wonder and surprise that I find it unnecessary to create new realities. There is more pleasure, for me, in things as-they-are.

  David Hurn

  Photography, Reality, Cameras

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• Most Americans are close to total ignorance about the world. They are ignorant. That is an unhealthy condition in a country in which foreign policy has to be endorsed by the people if it is to be pursued. And it makes it much more difficult for any president to pursue an intelligent policy that does justice to the complexity of the world.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Country, Ignorance, Intelligent

  "Spokespersons of US Right 'In Most Cases Stunningly Ignorant'". Interview with Gregor Peter Schmitz, www.spiegel.de. December 06, 2010.

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• I love these appeals to the "complexity of doing business in Alaska." If you want to live in remote villages or places with hostile weather and environment, that's certainly your right. But why is it you please continue to expect that the rest of us are responsible for making that economically feasible. You already get a big boost from oil and other natural resources. If that's not enough to pay for the infrastructure you say you need, maybe you should consider moving down here. No passport or work visa is required.

  Steven Pearlstein

  Moving, Environment, Enough

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

  Ralph Ellison

  Lying, Humanity, Littles

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• I am most interested in people. I try to capture their complexity and contradiction and beauty. It does not matter where they are from.

  Kwame Dawes

  People, Trying, Doe

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• As "Calvin and Hobbes" went on, the writing pushed the drawings into greater complexity. One of the jokes I really like is that the fantasies are drawn more realistically than reality, since that says a lot about what's going on in Calvin's head.

  Bill Watterson

  Writing, Reality, Drawing

  Source: www.annistonstar.com

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• You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.

  Terence McKenna

  Cutting, Years, Stupidity

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• Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance.

  Bruno Schulz

  Animal, Men, Example

  Bruno Schulz, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Goldfarb (2008). “The street of crocodiles and other stories”, Penguin Classics

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• In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.

  Michael Behe

  Serendipity, Luck, Mutation

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• With a live music performance, the ideas of the richness and complexity of our inner and outer worlds - the emotional world and the external world, like the planets, the weather, and the universe are really washing over you. Your body feels the intention more than your mind analyzing intellectually too much. I've always tried to do this in my music, to make it very direct and bodily, so that it communicates itself immediately, even to someone without prior knowledge of it.

  Sophie

  Emotional, Over You, Mind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap

  Alain de Botton

  Believe, Mean, Light

  Alain de Botton (2007). “The Architecture of Happiness”, p.121, Penguin UK

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• Religion, if it is genuine, is so profoundly interwoven with individual thought and experience that it is no more exhaustible than consciousness itself. And fiction whose purpose is didactic is bad no matter whether the matter to be "taught" is Christianity or the world view of Ayn Rand. It seems often to be assumed by writers that religion is a pose, meant to deceive oneself or others, or that it is a bad patch on doubt or complexity. This is only convention, however. The writers I know have a much deeper engagement with the real issues of religion.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Real, Doubt, World

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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