Top 100 Quotes About Complexity
#1. 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
#3. When once one believes in a creed, one is proud of its complexity, as scientists are proud of the complexity of science. It shows how rich it is in discoveries. If it is right at all, it is a compliment to say that it's elaborately right.
G.K. Chesterton
#5. Every man is tabernacled in every other, and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world.
Cormac McCarthy
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Emily Dickinson never developed. She remained loyal to her persona and to that same little metrical song that stood her in such good stead. She is a striking example of complexity within a simple package. Her rhymes are like bows on the package.
Billy Collins
#9. Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.
Michael Shermer
#10. The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome.
Douglas Adams
#11. When we consider reality itself we quickly become aware of its infinite complexity, and we realize that our habitual perception of it is often inadequate. If this were not so, the concept of deception would be meaningless.
Dalai Lama
#12. Our tactics were an amazing complexity of middling targets, inconsistent scheduling, and waffling commitment.
Bernie Fipp
#13. 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
#14. She still found no words in which she could express the complexity of her feelings; indeed, she could not even find thoughts in which she could clearly think out all that was in her soul.
Leo Tolstoy
#15. Intelligence seems to be correlated with the complexity with which we can simulate future events,
Michio Kaku
#16. The smell of subjectivity clings to the mechanical definition of complexity as stubbornly as it sticks to the definition of information.
Hans Christian Von Baeyer
#17. the brain of a child learning a language can cope with a mind-boggling amount of linguistic complexity.
Guy Deutscher
#18. To understand cancer as a whole, he reasoned, you needed to start at the bottom of its complexity, in its basement.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#19. All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity - it is to destroy it.
Joseph Conrad
#20. Human nature has a tendency to admire complexity but reward simplicity.
Ben Huh
#21. God transcends and encompasses conservatism and liberalism, certainty and doubt, simplicity and complexity, Divinity and humanity, crucifixion and resurrection.
Amos Smith
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Who values the past lives sentimentally.
Who optimizes the present grabs opportunity.
Who balances time creates harmony.
Who disturbs harmony leads complexity.
Who solves complexity opens continuity.
Angelica Hopes
#26. It comes from natural selection: the process which, as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity.
Richard Dawkins
#27. I'm glad that we have a history at all and that we can talk about feminist history. But I do think that it doesn't really pay attention to the complexity and the nuance that is feminist thought.
Jessica Valenti
#28. The detailed geometry of the coenzyme molecule as a whole is fascinating in its complexity.
Dorothy Hodgkin
#29. 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
#30. Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
Lionel Trilling
#31. One connection I see between the work I did on philosophy and my work on technology is that both communities tend to mystify and create an atmosphere of complexity.
Astra Taylor
#32. I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools.
Steven Pinker
#33. Some people fear seeing or feeling anything about which there is no general agreement. For others, it is thrilling to be aware of innuendo, shading, complexity.
Deena Metzger
#34. The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.
David Deutsch
#35. I am interested not in individual readings, but in constructing networks of images and meanings capable of reflecting the complexity of the subject.
Wolfgang Tillmans
#36. 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
#37. The Mozilla project is big in terms of lines of code and complexity.
Mitchell Baker
#38. We need a President who is not afraid of complexity, who believes in an open and tolerant society, and who knows that the world can be made new again - and that President is Al Gore.
Caroline Kennedy
#39. Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty. It's also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong.
Atul Gawande
#40. The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
Richard Dawkins
#41. Indeed, we have reached a level of complexity where simplicity itself is suspect. For example, the simple reality is that jobs migrate to less difficult nations. It's the old Rule of Capital: Capital goes where it is treated well.
Oliver DeMille
#42. Being a food show and being me, I always kicked it up a notch, which means I would always elevate the spice level or the complexity of a particular dish. So, it was always like we're going to kick this up a little bit.
Emeril Lagasse
#43. Sextants that divided the sky into angles not found in the usual geometries, microscopes whose hermetically sealed lenses distorted the viewed object into shimmering rainbow images, other instruments whose complexity and manifold adjustments quite overwhelmed my powers of speculation as to their use
K.W. Jeter
#44. The universe began in an instant, is expanding, and exhibits design, order, and complexity. Every effect must have a Cause, and design must have a Designer.
Ray Comfort
#45. I'm inordinately proud of Smash, on so many levels. The complexity of producing that show, every week, is just incredible. As a television producer and as a Broadway producer, which I once was, I am in awe of what we can do on that show, every week.
Robert Greenblatt
#46. As with real reading, the ability to comprehend subtlety and complexity comes only with time and a lot of experience. If you don't adequately acquire those skills, moving out into the real world of real people can actually become quite scary.
Jeffrey Kluger
#47. We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us. Dad began dresssing the pole with more complexity and less discernible logic. He draped some kind of fur over it on Groundhog Day and lugged out a floodlight to ensure a shadow.
George Saunders
#48. Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling
the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.
Niklaus Wirth
#49. As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.
Don DeLillo
#50. Even before it opened its retail arm, Beigh was renowned among pashmina cognoscenti for the quality and complexity of the work produced in its workshop, a large, airy, sunlit rectangle of a room directly across from its second-floor shop.
Hanya Yanagihara
#51. We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.
Mohsin Hamid
#52. We're looking at such enormous complexity and variety that it makes a mockery of "celebrating diversity." In the L.A. of the future, no one will need to say, "Let's celebrate diversity." Diversity is going to be a fundamental part of our lives. That's what it's going to mean to be modern.
Richard Rodriguez
#53. 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
#54. Pascal meditated upon outer space, but we need only turn our thoughts inward to feel his dread. Inside every one of our skulls lies an organ so vast in its complexity that it might as well be infinite.
Sebastian Seung
#55. They come to understand, with awe, the complexity of the compound identity that existed on the Earth. They conclude with a shudder that the Earthly you is utterly lost, unpreserved in the afterlife. You were all these ages, and you were none.
David Eagleman
#56. The complexity of economics can be calculated mathematically. Write out the algebraic equation that is the human heart and multiply each unknown by the population of the world.
P. J. O'Rourke
#57. Taken. There is so much intelligibility and specified complexity in this world that it seems willful and prejudiced to try to explain it away with no intelligence behind it. Can morality, personality, and reality be reasonably explained without a personal, moral first cause?
Ravi Zacharias
#58. Increasing consciousness = increasing complexity.
Ken Wilber
#59. I didn't think any biography could do justice to one of the few honest-to-goodness geniuses of our time, a walking paradox who wore a cloak of complexity and elusiveness, but Lisa Rogak has done an exemplary job of it.
Otto Penzler
#60. The total disorder in the universe, as measured by the quantity that physicists call entropy, increases steadily over time. Also, the total order in the universe, as measured by the complexity and permanence of organized structures, also increases steadily over time.
Freeman Dyson
#61. Of course you have days that are long, you're tired, and things aren't working out, and you can get frustrated, but I would say any of the things that make it less glamorous or cause some complexity or turn you down the road you weren't expecting to go down is a part of the thrill.
Ellen Page
#62. Over time, I started becoming more and more aware of the vastness and complexity of the universe, which led me away from any sort of conventional Christianity.
Moby
#63. Yes. Because they were human men. They were trying to write down the heart's truth out of the heart's driving complexity, for all the complex and troubled hearts which would beat after them.
William Faulkner
#64. Lego allows all levels of complexity. But a child can do their own thing at any level. They can built a pirate ship, for example, and then mash it up with completely different things.
Jorgen Vig Knudstorp
#65. We Americans are too often like children, steeped in moral tales that lack complexity and nuanced meaning.
(from the foreword in The War I survived Was Vietnam by Michael Uhl)
Steve Rees
#66. The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.
Max Horkheimer
#67. I personally have more faith than the average writer in people's willingness to be complicated, and so I'm thrilled by what's happened. I'm elated at audiences' willingness to handle complexity. In some sense, I feel like my belief in what people are capable of is being validated.
Michael Loceff
#68. The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.
Scott Turow
#69. It seemed to me he was well rid of Maureen, if she really was disturbing him to the extent that it appeared; but being judicious about other people's love affairs is easy, often merely a sign one has not understood their force or complexity.
Anthony Powell
#70. Philosophically speaking, from the Buddhist point of view, both human beings and animals possess what in Tibetan is called shepa, which can be roughly translated as "consciousness," albeit to different degrees of complexity.
Dalai Lama XIV
#71. What marks the transition from non-sentient to sentient beings? A model of increasing complexity based on evolution through natural selection is simply a descriptive hypothesis, a kind of euphemism for "mystery," and not a satisfactory explanation.
Dalai Lama XIV
#72. I know myself - I cannot just play a cliche. It has to be a character; it has to be written with the complexity of the human being behind. Could be bad, could be good, could be someone we would hate, but still, I need a reason for that influence, and I need to understand why.
Hiam Abbass
#73. The base of artistic pursuit is ambivalence and complexity. And that's what I try to do.
Fernando Perez
#74. Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#75. Amazing fine tuning occurs in the laws that make this complexity possible. Realization of the complexity of what is accomplished makes it very difficult not to use the word 'miraculous' without taking a stand as to the ontological status of the word.
George F. R. Ellis
#76. You want hot days to get your fruit ripe but then you want it to cool off nicely at night so that the grapes stay on the vine longer and develop complexity.
Drew Bledsoe
#77. Poverty is too complex to be answered with a one-size-fits-all approach, and if there is any place that illustrates that complexity, as well as a better way forward, it is Rwanda.
Jacqueline Novogratz
#78. Whereas the complexity of an object measures how complicated it is to describe, its information content measures the extent to which it describes the rest of the world. In other words, information is a measure of how much meaning complexity has.
Max Tegmark
#79. 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
#80. I think that electronic music mirrors the complexity of "information landscapes." You carry the terrain in your mind.
DJ Spooky
#81. If I were given a choice, I would stand by Eve and eat that forbidden apple once again. Why? I know there is beauty and meaning and significance in the complexity of our lives on earth. Otherwise, we are just animals. I prefer us to be human.
J.D. Radke
#82. As complexity rises, precise statements lose meaning and meaningful statements lose precision
Lotfi A. Zadeh
#84. It's Twitter's combination of simplicity and complexity that is astonishing in the same way that minimalist sculpture was inspiring and enlightening.
Kenneth Goldsmith
#85. Mrs. Kooshof's intolerance for complexity, for the looping circuitry of a well-told tale, symptomizes an epidemic disease of our modern world. (I see it daily among my students. The short attention span, the appetite limited to linearity. Too much Melrose Place.)
Tim O'Brien
#86. When the next big problem comes online, be it the Euro crisis, nuclear proliferation, an overstretched Internet, a killer flu, or any of the other possibilities I consider in X-Events, we will suffer a complexity overload.
John L. Casti
#87. Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
Brian Kernighan
#88. Complexity excites the mind, and order rewards it. In the garden, one finds both, including vanishingly small orders too complex to spot, and orders so vast the mind struggles to embrace them.
Diane Ackerman
#89. Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we - we were the flukes and the fossils. We
Peter Watts
#90. 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
#91. Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other.
Kevin Kelly
#92. Uncertainty is a good thing at the end of a narrative. A simultaneous gain and loss captures the complexity of human existence. The way one sentence follows another, if we pay attention to syntax and rhythm, should express the final effect we want the narrative to have on a reader.
Lee Martin
#93. People often associate complexity with deeper meaning, when often after precious time has been lost, it is realized that simplicity is the key to everything.
Gary Hopkins
#94. So much of language is unspoken. So much of language is compromised of looks and gestures and sounds that are not words. People are ignorant of the vast complexity of their own communication.
Garth Stein
#95. People who pride themselves on their "complexity" and deride others for being "simplistic" should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.
Thomas Sowell
#96. My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being - well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.
Dennis Ritchie
#97. I think one of the big things that's come out of ghostwriting for me is real compassion for the complexity of fame.
Hilary Liftin
#98. I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ (2 Cor. 11:3). Sin is the move away from simple devotion to Christ. Sin is spiritual complexity.
Tony Reinke
#100. Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.
Maria Semple
