Life Complexity Quotes

#1. Any one episode, or even moment, in a person's life is so complex, with so many layers of past and present, desire and indifference, drift and drive, consciousness and unconsciousness, that language is the best means we've found of approaching that kind of complexity.

Ben Fountain

#2. Life is easy greediness adds complexity

John Simm

#3. The history of the creative progress of individual artists shows that, along with their spiritual growth and the increasing complexity of their inner life, their forms of expression become more complex.

Mieczyslaw Jastrun

#4. 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

#5. All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity - it is to destroy it.

Joseph Conrad

#6. And once again Mr. Sherlock Holmes is free to devote his life to examining those interesting little problems which the complexity of human life so pletifuly presents.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#7. A few key terms that frame the dynamics of complexity theory will be a starting point for further study and further reflection on how complexity theory can increase our awareness of organizational dynamics and the nested systems of change that constitute life and change.

Milton Friesen

#8. The glory of sport is born at the moment when the game and the person become one, when all the complexity of one's life finds a moment to emerge in the game.

Timothy Shriver

#9. There was a great complexity to my father. He was a devoted family man. But, in the same breath, he simply was not suited to an anchored life. He should have been somebody who had a backpack, an old map, a bit of change in his pocket and that was it - roaming the world.

Christian Bale

#10. 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

#11. We see North Koreans as automatons, goose-steeping at parades, doing mass gymnastics with fixed smiles on their faces - but beneath all that, real life goes on with the same complexity of human emotion as anywhere else.

Barbara Demick

#12. Not all things that are simple are all that simple. Certain simple things carry complex weight!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#13. That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged, and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation that disperses all the complexity into some unsatisfying little decision - the balancing of scales ...

Tony Kushner

#14. Happiness lies in simplicity
Complexity brings anxiety.

Debasish Mridha

#15. 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

#16. Escapism preserves our sanity when the ever-increasing complexity and pace of modern life becomes too much.

Fennel Hudson

#17. The writer is often faced with two choices
turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.

Chinua Achebe

#18. Most research into life's murky origin has been carried out by chemists. They've tried a variety of approaches in their attempts to recreate the first steps on the road to life, but little progress has been made. Perhaps that is no surprise, given life's stupendous complexity.

Paul Davies

#19. There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.

P. J. O'Rourke

#20. Life can't be put on paper in all its complexity.

Angus Wilson

#21. I want to be read, and I certainly want to sell, but I also see my father's eye from Heaven: 'Always write quality. It doesn't matter if you sell; if it's good, it's good - if you capture the complexity of life.'

David Lagercrantz

#22. I read the script and decide if a particular character looks fun to play. I look for complexity and a sense of humor. Those are crucial, real things to life.

Steve Buscemi

#23. The neocortex allows for the subtlety and complexity of emotional life, such as the ability to have feelings about our feelings.

Daniel Goleman

#24. The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

Whitley Strieber

#25. To inquire into the origin of life is like seeking the origin of electrical machinery or the origin of music. Every increase in complexity of arrangement, of form, of substance, leads to new and often incalculable properties.

Gilbert Newton Lewis

#26. 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

#27. And this is also what he takes Christian doctrine, in all its complexity, to be centrally about, that is, teaching an attitude rather than a set of propositions. Call it joyous openness to life. What's not relevant about that?

George Pattison

#28. Less is more. Happiness is found close to the necessities of life, not in needless complexity and meaningless multiplicity of choice.

Peter Dale Scott

#29. These children will not be coming of age, this or any other summer. This August will not ask them to find hidden reserves of strength and courage as they confront the complexity of the adult world and come away sadder and wiser and bonded for life. This summer has other requirement for them.

Tana French

#30. Every layer of complexity creates greater distance from life's simple truths.

Fennel Hudson

#31. It's simple, it's not that simple; or life is simple, but the things in it are not. When a man does not understand it, he tends to inflate it. When he does, he tends to deflate it. In the end, neither images are fully accurate.

Criss Jami

#32. There is wisdom out there that can't be relayed in musings or sage advice. Like the complexity of life itself, it simply won't condense. It can only be shown in its entirety. It takes a story.

Lance Conrad

#33. Regardless of what crisis or complexity may be threatening to engulf your life, God is at work. You may not see it, but you need to know it's true. And He's not just doing one or two or a few things in that situation. He is doing a thousand or more things.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss

#34. Our archives are treasure troves - a testament to many lives lived and the complexity of the way we move forward. They contain clues to the real concerns of day-to-day life that bring the past alive.

Sara Sheridan

#35. Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

Confucius

#36. Black life is ambiguous, and a kaleidoscope of meanings, rich, multi-sided ... we have frozen our vision in figures that caricature, at best the complexity of our lives and leave the real artistic chore of interpretation unfinished.

Charles Bartlett Johnson

#37. Narrow life down to what's precious and necessary. In a world of complexity the best weapon is simplicity.

Price Pritchett

#38. From childhood on, I found many of my angels in favorite authors, writers who created books that enabled me to understand life with greater complexity. These works opened my heart to compassion, forgiveness, and understanding.

Bell Hooks

#39. I never knew anybody ... who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#40. A liberal education will impart an awareness of the amazing and precious complexity of human relationships. Since those relationships are violated more often out of insensitiveness than out of deliberate intent, whatever increases sensitiveness of perception and understanding humanizes life.

Sidney Hook

#41. A real Intelligence is an art to simplify complex matters without losing the integrity of that matter

Sumit Singh

#42. People are very complex. And for a psychologist, you get fascinated by the complexity of human beings, and that is what I have lived with, you know, in my career all of my life, is the complexity of human beings.

Daniel Kahneman

#43. But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already a loss.

Rebecca Solnit

#44. Beauty is not in complexity but it's in simplicity.

Debasish Mridha

#45. Everyone is a lonely victim of life's complexity.

Ted Dekker

#46. You render the small vast and few many,
use integrity to repay hatred,
see the complexity in simplicity,
find the vast in the minute.

Lao-Tzu

#47. Nothing is more important to our shared future than the well-being of children. For children are at our core - not only as vulnerable beings in need of love and care but as a moral touchstone amidst the complexity and contentiousness of modern life ...

Hillary Clinton

#48. For a child, it is in the simplicity of play that the complexity of life is sorted like puzzle pieces joined together to make sense of the world.

L.R. Knost

#49. Life. It is a fantastic word with an equally fantastic complexity.

Tim Voko

#50. Flew concluded that research into DNA had 'shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved'.

Antony Flew

#51. For all its complexity, however, astrology remains fundamentally simple. It offers a time-honored system of symbols that sum up key aspects of human life while providing profound insights and practical guidance.

Anne M. Nordhaus-Bike

#52. In private many scientists admit that science has no explanation for the beginning of life ... Darwin never imagined the exquisitely profound complexity that exists even at the most basic levels of life.

Michael Behe

#53. 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

#54. Coffee has ... expand[ed] humanity's working-day from twelve to a potential twenty-four hours. The tempo, the complexity, the tension of modern life, call for something that can perform the miracle of stimulating brain activity, without evil, habit-forming after-effects.

Margaret Meagher

#55. 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

#56. The northern ocean is beautiful, ... and beautiful the delicate intricacy of the snowflake before it melts and perishes, but such beauties are as nothing to him who delights in numbers, spurning alike the wild irrationality of life and baffling complexity of nature's laws.

John Lighton Synge

#57. Men are perplexed by the complexity of life;
angels are perplexed by the folly of men.

Matshona Dhliwayo

#58. I felt very isolated with my identity virtually my entire life, that nobody really got it and that I really didn't have the personal agency to express it, i kind of imagined that maybe at some point (I'd have to) own it publicly and discuss this kind of complexity.

Rachel Dolezal

#59. Stop trying to change reality by eliminating complexity.

David Whyte

#60. Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.

Ray Ozzie

#61. You need to bring your awakening into city life. Bring it into fast-paced complexity where it thrives.

John De Ruiter

#62. Intelligent design is a modest position theologically and philosophically. It attributes the complexity and diversity of life to intelligence, but does not identify that intelligence with the God of any religious faith or philosophical system.

William A. Dembski

#63. Most of the complexity of a human neuron is devoted to maintaining its life-support functions, not its information-processing capabilities. Ultimately, we will be able to port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate. Then our minds won't have to stay so small.

Ray Kurzweil

#64. The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.

Nancy Kress

#65. In its complexity and sensuality, nature invites exploration, direct contact, and experience. But it also inspires a sense of awe, a glimpse of what is still "un-Googleable" ... life's mystery and magnitude.

Kim John Payne

#66. Life is simple; WE create the complexity.

Steve Maraboli

#67. The history of life is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not the conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.

Stephen Jay Gould

#68. The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.

Michael Denton

#69. Failing to grapple with complexity actually turns out to be a pretty bad life strategy.

John Green

#70. Don't you sometimes feel bewildered when you think of the millions of things that put life together?' ... 'I;m not bewildered. I'm filled with the deepest awe and wonder. The miracle is that in its complexity it all works.

Julie Andrews Edwards

#71. The flow experience, like everything else, is not "good" in an absolute sense. It is good only in that it has the potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strength and complexity of the self.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

#72. As we embrace our passions and delve into the mystery of life, we unite with the majestic complexity of nature; and if we follow the signs, this can help us understand who we really are.

Sebastian Pole

#73. 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

#74. Doing a straight-forward, clear-cut task that has a beginning and an end balances out the complexity-without-end that often vexes the rest of my life. Sacred simplicity.

Robert Fulghum

#75. Love reduces the complexity of living. It amazes me that when Henry walks towards the cafe table where I wait for him, or opens the gate to our house, the sight of him is sufficient to exult me. No letter from anyone, even in praise of my book, can stir me as much as a note from him.

Anais Nin

#76. When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes.

Jack Kerouac

#77. The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

Joyce Carol Oates

#78. Simple works, complex fails.

Timothy Ferriss

#79. His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.

Oscar Wilde

#80. We can either change the complexities of life ... or develop ways that enable us to cope more effectively.

Herbert Benson

#81. The existence of many gods conveys true complexity of mortal life. Conversely, the assertion of but one god leads to a denial of complexity, and encourages the need to make the world simple. Not the fault of the god, but a crime committed by its believers.

Steven Erikson

#82. Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has only a few things of a grandeur not fit for us.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#83. The whole of life, in all its complexity and beauty, has been etched into the gold of words.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#84. Suddenly it was clear to me that all the beautiful complexity of life had simplicity at its core.

Eric Lander

#85. You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul.

Kevin Brockmeier

#86. The complexity of the emotional life of the play is what you live to work on.

Marsha Mason

#87. We are living in a very complex society. It puts me in a complex frame of thinking.

Ai Weiwei

#88. 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

#89. For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today.

Bill Bryson

#90. There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles.

Anne Rice

#91. It is never possible to understand completely any other human being; and no individual will ever really understand himself - the complexity is too great and there is not the time to constantly take things apart and examine them.

Edward T. Hall

#92. All of life in its complexity and beauty is forever minted in the gold of words.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#93. I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

David Allen

#94. Life has its beauty in its simplicity.
Ugliness raises her head with complexity.

Debasish Mridha

#95. If the process of life is about moving toward increased complexity and organization, a sort of sublime unfolding of greater and greater self-organizing systems, then we're actually doing pretty well.

Jason Silva

#96. In an age of complexity, it is not easy to live a simple life or to practice simplicity.

Debasish Mridha

#97. Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

Etgar Keret

#98. A philosophy of life is a bundle of wisdom you have gathered from your reading and experience. It is not a rigid ideology that allows no development and complexity. It's a living thing, a developing idea about life that belongs to you alone.

Thomas Moore

#99. [T]heories inevitably can't be as complex as life itself.

Yuval Levin

#100. (U)derneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us.

Northrop Frye