Complexity Quotes

“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.”
― Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

“Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“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

“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“Guests began drifting toward the edge of the lawn.
Jane heard the shift around her as someone whispered,
“Graham’s here.”
― D.L. Maddox, THE DOG WALKER: SECRETS: A PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER

“I believe it was the great ogre philosopher Gary who observed that complexity is, generally speaking, an illusion of conscious desire. All things exist in as simple a form as necessity dictates. When a thing is labeled 'complex,' that's just a roundabout way of saying you're not observant enough to understand it.”
― A. Lee Martinez, In the Company of Ogres

“All things remarkable are surprisingly simple; albeit difficult to find.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“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

“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, The View from the Seventh Layer

“God knew man would evolve. People think some of the Old Testament laws are absurd now because we live in a very different culture, a different time period. They had their problems and we have ours. God is constant but man is not, and he foreknew the ever-changing world his people would have to deal with; therefore, and if there is indeed an omniscient God, a Christ-like figure would be our only rational, possible connection to a constant, holy God throughout the evolution of culture and social law. The only answer that makes sense when it comes to relevance regarding religions and time periods is Christ, and the chances are slim that men could have invented it.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Complexity begets ambiguity, which yields in all ways to prejudice and avarice. Complication does not so much defeat Men as arm them with fancy.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior

“The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life.”
― Alain de Botton

“In the end, it’s not the obviousness or the complexity of the matters that’s deluding mankind. It’s man himself.”
― Pawan Mishra, Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy

“See the system. When you find yourself stuck in an oversimplified polarized conflict, a useful first step is to try to become more aware of the system as a whole: to provide more context to your understanding of the terrain in which the stakeholders are embedded, whether they are disputants, mediators, negotiators, lawyers, or other third parties. This can help you to see the forest and the trees; it is a critical step toward regaining some sense of accuracy, agency, possibility, and control in the situation.”
― Peter T. Coleman, The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts

“Every spot on earth is particular, detailed, and incomprehensibly complex.”
― Jane Smiley

“As the questions grow harder and more complicated, people yearn for simpler answers, one-sentence answers, answers that point unhesitatingly to a culprit who can be blamed for all our suffering, answers that promise that if we only eradicate the villains, all our troubles will vanish.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“It is complicated,’ they say. I am so sick of this response. Many people use it repeatedly to escape depth and confronting reality. They use it to take solace in the fact that they don’t know (or don’t wish to know) the ugly truth of what is happening right in front of their eyes. They reduce crimes, injustice, war, pain, hunger, rape, and everything that must be unpacked, dissected, and confronted to this: ‘It is complicated.’ They say this about COVID-19, too. Oh, how I have grown to hate this response. Every time I hear this statement from someone, it sounds like ‘I am a loser’ to my ears. ‘It is complicated’ is the favorite response of lazy brains that refuse to think and do. Oh, my friends, I insist it is not complicated. If you really want to know, it is not so complicated. However, if you are really looking for reasons and excuses to justify your silence, complicity, and to protect your self-interest, then you are absolutely right – it is complicated!”
― Louis Yako

“Time throws you out of its dimensionless planar like a boomerang. It unites with you again in death.”
― Vishwanath S J

“A simple statement is bound to be untrue. One that is not simple cannot be utilized.”
― Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

“... although the future is not predictable in any detail, it is manageable as an aggregate phenomenon.”
― Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

“Sufficiently simple natural structures are predictable but uncontrollable, whereas sufficiently complex symbolic descriptions are controllable but unpredictable.”
― Howard Pattee

“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, Killosophy

“Each human is a complex, contradictory story. Some stories within us have been unfolding for years, others are trembling with fresh life as they peek above the horizon. Each is a zigzag of emotional design and ancestral architecture. All the stories in the earth’s mind are connected.”
― Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems

“Finally, I had held up examples of Goldhagen's inflammatory language and suggested that he had missed the essence of what Primo Levi once called the 'grey zone' of human affairs, described by the historian Christopher Browning as that foggy universe of mixed motives, conflicting emotions, personal priorities, reluctant choices, opportunism and accomodation, all wedded, when convenient, to self-deception and denial. I thought that by marshalling his research into an overly narrow narrative, painted without nuance in black and white, the author had missed the human complexity and the ordinariness of racism.”
― Erna Paris, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History

“The human brain is by far the most complex physical object known to us in the entire cosmos.”
― Owen Gingerich, God’s Universe

“With complex, systemic challenges, there are no individual winners. Collectively addressing these means we all win; failure means we all lose.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“In tight coupling, small ripples in quiet waters become tidal waves.”
― Roger spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Loosely coupled systems enable experimentation and learning, benefitting from feedback loops.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Evolutionary pressure prioritizes relevance. The pressure is on us to make more thoughtful and informed decisions.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“In non-linear environments, assumptions amplify.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World