Top 100 Quotes About Complexity
#1. 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
#2. My background is in math and science, and I thrive on complexity, and I think lots of people do. People love puzzles; it's human nature to want to solve puzzles.
Michael Loceff
#3. The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it. We have talked enough; but we have not listened. And by not listening we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society - and thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek understanding.
William H. Whyte
#4. Governments don't protect people, people protect governments."
"Order is organic, it can't just be ordered up."
"The more complexity, the more unpredictability and therefore the more uncontrollability. You cannot control what you cannot predict.
Lawrence Samuels
#5. Sudden falls can come to societies that know too little history or that have furnished their minds with easy one-note propaganda in place of the true complexity and terrible beauty of the storied past.
Dean Koontz
#6. 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
#7. In spite of the enormous complexity of macroscopic bodies when viewed from an atomistic viewpoint, one knows from everyday experience as well as from precision experiments that macroscopic bodies obey quite definite laws.
Franz Mandl
#8. I'm kind of a sloppy feminist. Any ideology makes me a little nervous because there's some point where it doesn't allow for the complexity of things.
Kim Gordon
#9. Wordsmiths who serve established power ... castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim.
John Ralston Saul
#10. If we are merely a chance product of 'random happenstance' and nothing more, doesn't it strike you as a bit odd that we have the ability to contemplate the question of 'random happenstance' with such methodical complexity?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#12. When U.S.-based editors and columnists parachute into a news storm, it is often the stringers who keep us out of trouble, helping us glimpse the complexity behind the headlines.
Nancy Gibbs
#13. There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all just interpreting signals from the universe and trying to make sense of them. Dim, shaky, weak, static-y little signals that only hint at the complexity of a universe we cannot begin to understand.
Bones The Doctor In The Photo
#14. By the moonlight he watched his wife for the last time. His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love.
Carson McCullers
#15. Simplicity isn't just a visual style. It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep.
Walter Isaacson
#16. I believe human beings mark a threshold in the development of the planet, of course, but it is only part of the picture. What Big History can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power, with collective learning.
David Christian
#17. Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.
Dan Simmons
#18. Some people perceive Skinner to be complex. I just basically was trying to remember my lines, so I guess that's what they perceive as being complexity.
Mitch Pileggi
#19. For better or worse, whether it is a sign of aesthetic complexity or of intellectual indecision, this novel [Frankenstein] offers equally fertile ground to those readers who like their meanings ambiguous and indeterminate and to those who prefer to discern a deeply important doctrine.
Richard T. Nash
#20. The depth of any story is proportionate to the protagonist's commitment to their goal, the complexity of the problem, and the grace of the solution.
Steve House
#21. You cannot conceive of the magnitude of this mystery." He spoke in a confidential whisper. "You cannot conceive of this complexity." He was saying these words as if he'd just discovered them. He wept. I swear it. He wept.
Anne Rice
#22. 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
#23. Find a bigger enemy than just a rival brand. It can be bad design. It can be time. It can be pollution. It can be ugliness. It can be bad service. It can be landfill. It can be complexity. But pick your enemy well. It will drive you forward.
David Hieatt
#24. Those swirls in the cream mixing into the coffee? That's us. Ephemeral patterns of complexity, riding a wave of increasing entropy from simple beginnings to a simple end. We should enjoy the ride.
Sean Carroll
#25. The greatness of common sense, and its title to reverence, appear in this, that it deals with vast complexity, that is, with the innumerable elements of a situation. Common sense discerns and judges a path through this knotted and tangled maze.
James Vila Blake
#26. You don't always have to show art in what's called a white box; you can have a kind of complexity within an exhibit which actually respects the art as well.
Zaha Hadid
#28. The volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.
Atul Gawande
#29. The structures were austere and simple, until one looked at them and realized what work, what complexity of method, what tension of thought had achieved the simplicity.
Ayn Rand
#30. I was a Spidey fan as a kid. I always liked the complexity and the teenaged angst that Spider-Man, Peter Parker, always had to deal with. It was kind of a deeper, darker storytelling that just good-guy-beats-bad-guy.
Jack Coleman
#31. Forget the complaints against complexity; instead, complain about confusion.
Donald A. Norman
#32. I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.
Ken Burns
#33. He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.
E. M. Forster
#34. The novelist is the person who spends a lot of his or her day thinking about the human drama and emotional complexity.
Thane Rosenbaum
#35. There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.
Peter Drucker
#36. Countless as the sands of the sea are human passions.
Nikolai Gogol
#37. I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I'd opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it's constantly evolving and gaining complexity.
Virginia Madsen
#38. 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
#39. If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.
Evelyn Waugh
#40. Anyone who is considered funny will tell you, sometimes without even your asking, that deep inside they are very serious, neurotic, introspective people.
Wendy Wasserstein
#41. I'm wondering if every person I pass has similar depths, and if there's any way to avoid the mistake of judging them so shallowly that I'm rocked when they show their true complexity.
Brandon Sanderson
#42. We need language. We need language to tell stories. We need stories to create a self. We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains. The self we create is a fiction.
Mohsin Hamid
#43. I'm a minimalist. I see things in simple ways ... It's human nature to define complexity as better. Well, it's not.
Gordon Willis
#44. Software is different than other products um, partly because it's, it's not physical and, and partly because of its complexity. You can express in software millions of different cases and making sure that you handle all of them correctly is extremely difficult.
Bill Gates
#45. All living things must grow or they will die. Adaptation to change is a characteristic of all living systems. Thus, all living things must grow, adapt, evolve, or die. Evolution is nature's creative way of pushing living organisms to higher degrees of complexity. We adapt up, not compromise down.
Alvin Conway
#46. Increasing complexity on its own is not, however, the ultimate goal or end-product of these evolutionary processes. Evolution results in better answers, not necessarily more complicated ones. Sometimes a superior solution is a simpler one.
Ray Kurzweil
#47. The machine was so intricate, so complicated, that he almost got dizzy looking at it. Even in its sad state of disrepair, it was beautiful.
Brian Selznick
#48. The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.
Edsger Dijkstra
#49. Mastery comes via a monomaniacal focus on simplicity versus an addiction to complexity.
Robin Sharma
#50. My characteristics as a scientist stem from a non-conformist upbringing, a sense of being something of an outsider, and looking for different perceptions in everything from novels, to art to experimental results. I like complexity and am delighted by the unexpected. Ideas interest me.
Peter C. Doherty
#51. Our lives are complex; our emotions are complex; our intellectual desires are complex. I believe that architecture ... needs to mirror that complexity in every single space that we have, in every intimacy that we possess.
Daniel Libeskind
#52. It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#53. Sometimes idiosyncrasies which used to be irritating become endearing, part of the complexity of a partner who has become woven deep into our own selves.
Madeleine L'Engle
#54. Dropbox looks really simple to the end user and is extremely magical and just works. But under the hood, the complexity of the technology is huge. The amount of work it requires to store, scale and move this data is pretty intense.
Ruchi Sanghvi
#55. I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity; in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It's about bringing order to complexity.
Jonathan Ive
#56. It's the Hitler within us that's our problem," said the media expert Peter Boenisch. "Germans are pigheaded. The fascination of Hitler is a reaction to the complexity of the world, so complicated and so insoluble for the lower strata. There is no outlet for frustration.
Peter Wyden
#57. 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
#58. It is not possible to refer a complex difficulty to a single cause.
Helen Keller
#59. Motivation is a fine example of social complexity. It is nonlinear and sometimes unpredictable. It cannot be defined or modeled with a single diagram.
Jurgen Appelo
#60. 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
#61. The complexity of a subject, if crucial for understanding the story, needs to be shown in the visualisation. Thus, in many cases, clarifying a subject requires increasing the amount of information, not reducing it.
Alberto Cairo
#62. Complexity is not a good enough reason to give up on any idea.
Gagan Jain
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Men rush towards complexity, but they yearn towards simplicity. They try to be kings; but they dream of being shepherds.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#66. There's something in this country that is so opposed to understanding the complexity of children.
Maurice Sendak
#67. The practice of Yoga brings us face to face with the extraordinary complexity of our own being.
Sri Aurobindo
#68. Does anything show the complexity of the miraculous brain more than that weird curiosity, the sleep-protection dream?
Dick Cavett
#70. I have problems with the violence and the torture on '24.' What I'm trying to say is that that's not the only story, and I think that the cognitive complexity is as important.
Steven Johnson
#71. Make sure your message is clear, yet that you are faithful to its complexity.
Michael Dirda
#72. Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity
Vladimir Nabokov
#73. Just as all pop music is not simplistic, not all contemporary concert music is complex. Often what a person connects with goes much deeper than generalized issues of simplicity and complexity.
Michael Hersch
#74. A complicated idea is a confused idea.
Marty Rubin
#75. In debugging, errors are seen not as false but as fixable. This is a state of mind that makes it easy to learn from .6 Multiple passes also brought a new feel for the complexity of design decisions.
Sherry Turkle
#76. If you want to gain market share at your competitor's expense - look for a customer that's suffering from too much complexity and simplify it.
Peter Cohan
#77. Compared to the complexity of the universe, this world of ours is like the brain of a worm.
Haruki Murakami
#78. The techniques have galloped ahead of the concepts. We have moved away from studying the complexity of the organism; from processes and organisation to composition.
James Black
#79. A belief in the purposeful complexity of Fate is always more comforting than random, straightforward facts. This may be why Mother preferred to believe in Atlantis and UFOs rather than in virtually everything else.
Bradley Denton
#80. The usual duty of the "intellectual" is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae.
Christopher Hitchens
#81. The complexity of language, he thought to himself, lies not in its subject matter but in our knotted understanding.
Alexander Theroux
#82. Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s, and for other generations it will be something else. Change is scary for everyone, as is complexity, contradiction, and an uncertain future.
Gary Ross
#83. 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
#84. On the Web, we can be whoever we wish to be, editing the face we show to others in ways that aren't possible in physical space. We can also fine-tune the complexity and depth of our interactions and relationships.
Walter Kirn
#85. The thematic bucket of vomit that I've been chained to since I was about 9 is the moral complexity of anti-heroism. I have always been interested in good people who do bad things for understandable reasons.
Neil Cross
#86. Psychology either tends to glorify human beings or trivialize them, leaving out the complexity of the human soul and the demands of God.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
#87. We are the products of our past ... a web of complexities.
Janet Leigh
#89. Embrace your complexity, stretch your creativity, and live up to your potential, you are what makes the world great.
Dan Wells
#90. Complexity is acceptable as long as it is intelligible and necessary. We want to avoid needless complications.
Donald A. Norman
#91. Failing to grapple with complexity actually turns out to be a pretty bad life strategy.
John Green
#92. motherhood is like this: a series of tiny moments that add up to an enormous love, with lots of other moments of frustration and misunderstanding and complexity woven in between.
Allison Winn Scotch
#93. When people want to sound smart, they add syllables to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to books. They try to make up in quantity and complexity what they lack in quality. That's bullshit! They're just hiding their bullshit!
Robert McKee
#94. if Watson is going to replace any physicians, it will likely be at the low end of complexity - for
Robert Wachter
#95. From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.
Abdus Salam
#96. If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.
Ian Stewart
#97. The right amount of complexity is what creates the optimal simplicity
David Allen
#98. Ideology follows the money."
"Governments don't protect people, people protect governments."
"To accept the legitimacy of the state is to embrace the necessity for war.
Lawrence Samuels
#99. Complexity is not good. People don't understand the elegance of simplicity.
Gordon Willis
#100. Look at yourself as someone who is reaching for healing, and at the complexity of what needs to be healed. Do not think that you exist alone without other human beings of equal complexity.
Gary Zukav
