Complexity Quotes

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
― Confucius

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
― E.F. Schumacher

“We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“If you're not confused, you're not paying attention.”
― Tom Peters, Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution

“Hours passed—or maybe days. It didn’t matter. The body adapted. But the mind—
The mind needed purpose.
      ”
― D.L. Maddox, THE DOG WALKER: THE PREQUEL

“She did not know yet how sometimes people keep parts of themselves hidden and secret, sometimes wicked and unkind parts, but often brave or wild or colorful parts, cunning or powerful or even marvelous, beautiful parts, just locked up away at the bottom of their hearts. They do this because they are afraid of the world and of being stared at, or relied upon to do feats of bravery or boldness. And all of those brave and wild and cunning and marvelous and beautiful parts they hid away and left in the dark to grow strange mushrooms—and yes, sometimes those wicked and unkind parts, too—end up in their shadow.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

“Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience -- to appreciate the fact that life is complex.”
― M. Scott Peck

“If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.”
― Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World

“When people complain of your complexity, they fail to remember that they made fun of your simplicity.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“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, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

“Her complexity is a glorious fire that consumes, while her simplicity goes unapproachable. But if one takes time to understand her, there is something beautiful to find, something simple to be loved. But she goes unloved, for being misunderstood.”
― Anthony Liccione

“She wore people down like waves wore down stone.
Consistent. Patient. Relentless. Merciless.
       ”
― D.L. Maddox, THE DOG WALKER: THE PREQUEL

“And the answers she was seeking were on full display, right in front of her.
Not chaos. Not blood. Not even sound.
Just clarity.”
― D.L. Maddox, THE DOG WALKER: THE PREQUEL

“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, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Simplicities are enormously complex. Consider the sentence "I love you".”
― Richard O. Moore, Writing the Silences

“The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

“To love is to think.
And I almost forget to feel only from thinking about her.
I don’t know what I want at all, even from her, and I don’t think about anything but her.
I have a great animated distraction.
When I want to meet her,
I almost feel like not meeting her,
So I don’t have to leave her afterwards.
And I prefer thinking about her, because it’s like I’m afraid of her.
I don’t know what I want at all, and I don’t want to know what I want. All I want to do is think about her.
I’m asking nothing of nobody, not even her, except to think.”
― Alberto Caeiro, O Pastor Amoroso

“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, Leap

“Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“Cleverness isn't always true nor is the truth always clever.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“The more elaborate his labyrinths, the further from the Sun his face.”
― Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad: The strange story of a monastery which was once called The Ark

“As time moves on the line will blur. It will no longer seem to be the simplicity of good versus evil, but good versus fools who think they are good.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future

“We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex.”
― Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

“Simplicity is a bliss that makes one comprehend.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“What's simple is that everything good comes from God, and everything bad comes from man. Where it gets complicated is that everything seemingly good but ultimately bad comes from man, and everything seemingly bad but ultimately good comes from God.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.”
― Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

“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

“At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was already clear that, chemically speaking, you and I are not much different from cans of soup. And yet we can do many complex and even fun things we do not usually see cans of soup doing.”
― Philip Nelson, Biological Physics: Energy, Information, Life

“Time cannot put anything in your hands until you let go off the time.”
― Vishwanath S J